Leg 17.
In the morning it was brisk to say the least, but beautiful. Had to be in the 20’s at best with a heavy frost everywhere.
We ate a bagel and a couple more food bars and got an early start headed back to the bikes at 45, hopefully where we left them the day before.
This was one of the absolutely most enjoyable legs of the trip to date. Beautiful pine forest, fairly level terrain, intermittent small stream crossings – we were having a ball.
We passed thru a couple of long ago abandoned hunting camps and an area that had been cleared several years ago thru a prescribed burn of the lower brush and fuel on the forest floor.
Found this birds nest - I think from a Jay.
Jumped one deer, a large mule deer doe that I saw take off from about 50 yards in front of us, but not much other wildlife. We crossed a couple of hundred hard wide pastures that were flooded which was a pain as we couldn’t avoid getting our feet wet. We only saw one ranch a half mile or more down one of these pasture meadows to the south.
Caught the pic you see of the tangled limbs of a tree we chose to take a break under late in the morning.
Most of the line was close to our map and fenced, although in a couple of places there was a current fence and at least two other ancient parallel fence lines 20 to 30 yards north or south of the current state line.
A couple of the large meadows had significant boulder fields of lava rock which were not easy to traverse with any speed. We always wonder what it must have been like crossing such areas as a pioneer in a wagon.
Made pretty good time taking care to skirt one hunting camp while making plenty of noise about the halfway point to 45 and surprise – the bikes were still there.
My lucky number mile point 44 had the biggest rats nest on it.
We usually cleaned off the debris so we could get a picture of the monument.
The ride back to the truck was great as it had warmed up and the flat, well packed cinder and dirt roads made for some fun full throttle stretches. Never did see any hunters while hiking, but we passed a couple of guys trolling along the road with their quads that were clearly surprised to see us overtake them. Drove back to the truck in about 30 minutes, took a quick break and then headed on to the east with the bikes along Corral Creek road which parallels the state line before dropping south and then into the Goose Lake basin. We ran on down to about 32 where the road leaves the state line and wanders more to the south skirting the cliffs bordering the Renner Lake valley.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
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