Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/143901
(Clockwise from top left) The "Racetrack" features moving rocks on a dry lake bed. Taking a breather at the northeast end of the Eureka dunes. The base camp. also known as the "Saline Hilton." View of the upper Panamint Valley from Iiunter Mountain. The Steele Pass "freeway." Hot springs area pleasure. 'i Q went over the Inyo Mountains 13.5 miles to Swansea are barely visible up in Daisy Canyon. The salt was mined steadily from 1913 to 1918, then intermittently until 1930. It is said the salt was 99.3% pure and much of it was sold just as it was scraped from the lake bed. High operating costs are credited with its demise. Some articles also cite that the blistering heat in summer and the distance from the "joys of life" (wine, women and song), as the problems of getting workers to mine the salt. Our next ride was to Eureka Valley . to see the largest single sand dune in California. Its 3.5 miles long, one mile wide and rises a claimed 680 feet high. I'll buy the length and width . but the height is in the neighborhood of 300 to 350 feet. In the late 1800s this . ~~~ 'ttrtitWh as·1'eYri'lhta'ti'oi1'· 8' • '7 Valley. The route to Eureka Valley is something to behold. We started at Palm Spring at 8:00 a.m. and headed northeast. The weather was cool but warmed up to over goo in short order. From Palm Spring to Upper Warm Spring it is a fairly easy but rocky two track route. The next 14 miles to the summit at Steele Pass is sand, rocks, some variety of bushes that really bite and just plain crud. The BLM makes you stay in the bottom of the wash. It's their vehicle corridor which of course is not the best route. The exact route sometimes is not visible, so pick the worst and you'll be close. We were lucky and a previous vehicle had left some faint tracks here and there. I used a topo map and compass and was able to pinpoint my location most'ohhe wa-y: This is not necessary but I find it part of the fun. When I a backpacker it was sometimes very important. The route from Palm Spring to Marble Bath is shown on the Dry Mountain topo map dated 1957, marked as a jeep trail. The northern half is not shown on topos. I traced the route from a BLM map and came very close to the exact route. Many places along this segment has sections of golf ball sized rocks, slick as grease, and no bottom, The sand is sometimes hub deep. A couple of places had razor blade sharp rocks that played hell with tires. I lost about four knobs completely and pieces of a dozen more. If there has been a fair amount of rain this route can have dramatic changes. Some sections required an unprofessional dog paddling'riding , wa~ style. Our average for the first 15 miles was a hot seven miles per hour. The elevation changed from 1500 to 5200 feet. It didn't seem we' were climbing 240 feet per mile unless you looked back down th~ trail. The scenery here is bare, rock covered mountains, having an almost lunar quality. The white billowy clouds against a cerulean sky was worth all the,sweat we had worked up. Near the summit at Marble Bath (now covered with sand and not visible) this writer, using a foot as an outrigger, hooked a rock with a boot and was almost pulled off the bike. This is known as a H.U.B. (head up bottom) maneuver. Due to the advanced age of the body and the speed of the bike, it resulted in a very painful hip inj ury. After a long rest at '5teele Pass and the inj ury a fa€tor the