Jarbidge or Bust - "Overlanding" Nevada 2015

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I've thought about those, but ultimately decided against it because I can't stand things blocking my view. Bobbleheads, sun visors, hangtags, radar guns on a suction cup, air fresheners, mardi gra beads from the rear view... so I just live with it and pay the consequences.

Plus, I would constantly have to pull it down to take pictures, text or post on 'mud!

We did come up with a solution, though. We took the mighty power of the cup and channelled its energy for good instead of evil.

Behold, the mobile communications command center, operation overland expedition edition...

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The radio, mic, and both phones were all contained, out of the way yet within easy reach.
 
Dan (spressomon) gives us some tips on where to camp, so we mash our motors Dukes of Hazzard style out of the Planet X parking lot and hit the pavement toward the Black Rock Desert, home of the Burning Man deal.

In no time at all, we find a dirt road heading toward the hills. We pull in, find a campsite and park for the evening. You can see THE Playa off in the distance, absent the tripping hippies and burning sh!t.

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We were surrounded by desert sage bushes, and the wonderful smell cannot be adequately described.

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Eventually cruiserdrew hooked us up with some dinner, a delicious braised beef stew-like awesomeness served atop some crazy sourdough garlic toast. My wife and daughter made & sent with us some mini-cheesecakes for dessert, which Andy washed down with some homemade orange jello. Or was it orangecello ? I can't remember, it was potent, yet smooth and sweet.

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This was my morning to cook breakfast. I wanted to recreate my taco-lettes on the trail. This requires a broiler, which we didn't have, but Andy improvished and "broiled" the cheese with a torch. Here we are running two of Coleman's finest, the giant 426C three burner...

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(First two pics by @concretejungle )

After breakfast, it was time to pack up and hit the road...

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Our route had us flying across the Playa. We found an entrance to it, but as suspected, it was too wet from all the rain. We were warned that, with any precipitation, we would find ourselves in frame deep mud and our day would be spent on recovery. We stopped at the edge, just long enough for Alex to play with and destroy his RC truck.

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We skip the Playa and stay on the blacktop until we pick up our trail.

We roll for a while until we find a good place to stop for lunch - tasty sausage & pepper sammiches courtesy of Pasquale...

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After eating ourselves into a coma, we fight the sleepies and head back on the trail.

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FJ60Cam said:
We skip the Playa and stay on the blacktop until we pick up our trail.

We roll for a while until we find a good place to stop for lunch - tasty sausage & pepper sammiches courtesy of Pasquale...

After eating ourselves into a coma, we fight the sleepies and head back on the trail.
Click to expand...


That's what espressos are for...its either a nap or an espresso or three :D

BTW: I'm enjoying every word and photo of your post ups Cam (and Alex ;))!
 
spressomon said:
That's what espressos are for...its either a nap or an espresso or three :D

BTW: I'm enjoying every word and photo of your post ups Cam (and Alex ;))!
Click to expand...

See, what had happened was...

We didn't have any espresso. So, in a rare move on Andy's part, we had a beer instead.

That did NOT have the same effect.
 
The weather was constantly shifting. We were fortunate to avoid most of the showers that were all around us.

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The terrain was constantly changing as well. Every mountain crossing yielded a drop into a different climate. My stereotypes of Nevada were constantly being proven wrong.

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Out here, we came across our first wild horses. And our first stallion piles (please somebody tell me you got a pic!), which would become worked into the topic of every conversation from this moment forward.

Stallion piles are massive amounts of stallion sh!t all organized into one giant pile. At first, I didn't realize these were wild horses, since there are fences and cattle nearby. I thought maybe somebody shoveled the horse crap into a pile for some unknown reason or use. Some of the piles were three or feet wide and a foot tall. Some were perfect towers two feet tall. For some reason, these were usually located in the road, sometimes in the middle (tall enough to take out your axle), sometimes in a tire track. Either way, you did not want to hit one with any part of your truck.

Andy tried to tell us that the head pimp stallion of the herd produced one of the bad boys in a single bowel movement as a show of his awesome power to all of his ladies. The real story is that, in the same way that dogs mark their territory, stallions mark their territory with sh!t. And just as gangs cover up the graffiti of rival gangs with graffiti of their own, the stallions top off the piles of enemy stallions in an effort to show 'em who is boss.

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This area is so vast that it is very easy to spread out, completely out of sight from the next truck.

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I'm not sure if it was Cam or Andrew, but from the moment stallion piles were discovered, there was constant funny coming from the brown truck (go figure). Anyway, they were impossible to miss, and as Cam said they were 2 feet tall, I swear that huge one near our camp must have been 4 feet tall and contained 1000 pounds of horse sh*t. When I finally got to clean off the 1000 pounds of mud at the end of the trip, the smell told me there was only 800 pounds of mud, and the balance was a horsey remembrance or our trip.
 
We finally made it to one of the places Dan marked on our tracks as a campsite and parked it for the night.

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If you look close, just to the left of my tent, you can see a small example of a stallion pile. That one is taking up over half the road.

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The truck is still going strong! This is also a shot for Bomar of his Trasharoo. That thing has seen some sh!t. The stories it could tell...

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Andrew was hired to dig a firepit (I later confiscated his cash to pay for the toll roads in Oklahoma), and we gathered around the fire as Tom cooked a delicious dinner of crab cakes and a frozen garden salad.

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(salad pic by Alex)

Somebody finally confessed that the salad was nasty and we were then all able to toss it. Tom had to make another round of crab cakes as his punishment for serving the frozen salad.

Here we are around the fire, listening as Alex told about this one mother-of-all-stallion-piles stallion pile that he saw...

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"Dude, I'm telling you, it was THIS tall!!!"

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Tom eventually joined us, and by that time Andy was telling us about the 1000 lb pile of poo...

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Andy woke Andrew & I up quickly the next morning. There was a storm approaching and we had better get packed up. We got packed up and Alex cooked us breakfast under his awing, which we had cobbled back together with the bent poles.

The storm blew over without much drama and we hit the trail again...

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We occasionally saw some wildlife...

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...and lots of cows...

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