Continue to get ready by flashlight. As usual everything that normally is quiet is noisy and I end up waking the Wrench Wench several times. Even with all that, am still away just after dawn.
Dave here is riding his Victory to the Elk Hills oil preserve where he works supposedly not drilling for oil.At the "big-gas" station just west of town pay 4 bucks a gallon, but make a new friend.
Once gassed up it is an easy 20 minutes to Taft and the 33 cutoff, then to the 58W.
God I love that sign...70 miles with now services also means 70 miles with no cops,sweet!
After opening with a few basic runs SR58 starts climbing over the mountain in earnest.
These kind of Road Cuts always amaze me! How do they do that?
It is possible to turn on Seven Mile Road but but only if I want to ride six and a half miles on gravel. Somedays maybe, not on this particular day. That means carrying on on SR58 further down into the valley until reaching Soda Lake Road. Soda Lake Road runs south to the little town of California Valley which I almost felt sorry for them but they seem happy enough hanging out at the fire station.
Down the narrow road with the ranching fences on either side. Past California City the road angles back toward the east. The vast dirty white expanse of Soda Lake begins to stretch out to the left.
After riding around seeing what I could see from the back of the bike I finally rode out to the east of Soda Lake and parked where the road turned to gravel.
I mushed across the desert grass to the edge of the salt flat where I saw this very impressive footprint. Knowing that a photograph like this would be meaningless without some context I decided to use my foot as a size reference.
I had no idea how mushy the rain had made things and my foot sunk into the muck past my ankle. Instinctively my other foot goes down to compensate and gets equally sucked into the goo. Then, of course, my hand went down into the cold wet mud just like my feet had.
I eventually managed to extricate a foot, but left my boot in the mud. Same thing with the other foot.
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