I’ve been wanting to do a multi-day, camping, dirt bike ride (adventure ride) for quite a while. Having ridden woods and mountains my whole life, the desert is always a treat because it’s so different. My friend Dale rode his plated Honda XR600 and I rode my KTM 640. We spent 6 days riding in Nevada, the Black Rock Desert, and occasional crossing back and forth into Northern California.
Day
1
We left Sacramento in the late afternoon on Saturday, September 19th.
We rode up hwy 80 to Truckee – not a fun way to start, but it got
us out of town. As the darkness was coming quick, we setup camp near Boca
reservoir.
Day
2
Our camp north of Boca.
We both had a TERRIBLE night’s sleep. Cold, uncomfortable, weird
noises, obnoxious campers yelling, etc. This resulted in a slow morning,
but things got better from there. At this point we’ve left the asphalt
and rarely had to ride pavement again until the last day of the trip.
We wandered through Cold Springs and happened upon a Blue Angels air show
which we watched part of. Here's Dale.
Next we hit fast dirt roads and ended up at Moon Rocks (popular OHV area).
We passed through and I just followed anything that looked fun and went NE.
This led us down some really scenic 4x4 roads, up a creek bed and finally to a dead end at an old dam. A bit of backtracking and we were going again.
The green below is where the road ran out and you can see the dam.
Some minor navigation confusion later on got us going farther south than we desired. It was getting late and we’d used about half our gas, so we reluctantly went south again to Sparks and stayed in a hotel.