We blasted off and headed South along the Eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for the first part of Day Four. We were going to take a detour up into the mountains to hit some good twisties, but as we sat on the side of the road we could actually see the road we wanted to take snake up the side of the mountain and it was just this little squiggly white line. We weren't about to willingly take our bikes up into the snow so that little detour was quickly shelved. We grabbed some breakfast and continued to head South until we ran into Hwy 120. Well, we ran PAST it due to some very poor signage, but we got turned around and made it down the right road. This turned out to be a very interesting road. We got some nice shots of the bikes in the snow (and I think Bong got one of JD peeing in the snow even) as we crossed over the summit of some random mountain. Once we headed down the back side we hit a long straight downhill stretch so Mark and I just gunned it. I got it up to 150 before backing off. After this the road turned into a crazy stretch of some wicked dips. I can't adequately describe this road, it was totally insane with dozens of incredibly sharp dips in the road followed immediately by a quick rise. It felt as though you could easily just launch off the top of one of the dips only to completely ram the bike into the following rise they were so close together. In fact, I about shit myself when I caught air at 120 coming off the top of one of the rises.
Eventually we made our way all the way South and gassed up just before hitting Death Valley. We were all geared up for cold weather as we had been riding in the mountains and so we all took turns in the men's room at the gas station in Lone Pine, CA changing out of our cold gear and into our warm weather gear in preparation for the heat we knew would be coming. Pretty entertaining to see a bunch of motorcycle guys all file in and out of the john all changing clothes.
Shortly after entering the park we all stopped along the side of the road and got some great pictures of the bikes at the top of a cliff overlooking the Northern part of Death Valley. After this, three of us (Marv, JD and myself) busted ass out of there and hit some gnarly twisties on our way into the heart of the valley. Death Valley has twisties (and good ones!), who knew?!?! I got a pic of my bike at the sea level elevation point and continued on till I hit the main museum at the bottom of the valley. Managed to meet a very sweet officer Jennifer who for some reason didn't like the fact that I was travelling at 93mph in a 60mph zone. Met up with JD and Marv at the museum and waited for the rest of the crew to show up.
And waited....
And waited...
After about 2 hours of waiting we were getting pretty concerned and figured something had to have gone wrong. Marv was able to get the Rangers at the museum to radio ahead and found out that Marks brand new '08 BMW was having an ignition problem. Basically his key has a little RFID chip and the sensor around the ignition wasn't picking it up so the bike wouldn't start at all. We waited around for a couple more hours hoping the guys would get it fixed and we'd be ok, but that never happened. The three of us decided to head back up to find the rest of the guys to get some more info, but shortly after leaving we ran into Steve who was on his way to get to us. It had been decided that the four of us would ride on to Vegas (our scheduled end point for the day) while the rest of the guys stayed behind waiting for a truck to show up and get the bike out of there. At this point I decided to just continue on to Utah and stay the night at my brother's house so I took off ahead of everyone else to try to make good time to get there. I went through Pahrump, NV and was hoping to get a picture of my bike in front of a brothel, but I wasn't able to locate a single one. Total bummer. Stopped off in Vegas for gas and to get a bite to eat at the Spearmint Rhino and eventually pried myself out of there and took off across the desert in the middle of the night for my brothers house. I made it there somewhere around 1:30am and promptly passed the fuck out.
Turns out that the guys in the desert had a pretty miserable time. They waited for who knows how fucking long before finally getting a truck out there in the dead of night to get the bike out of there. The only problem was they were headed the wrong way and went into California instead of Nevada! They spent the night somewhere near Bakersfield after they finally got the fuck out of there.
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