~ somewhere out there ~

As someone who has no sense of direction, I frequently find myself wondering where in the world I am located. Normally, however, I am in the presence of someone who is aware of our location, and so I find little cause for concern. This weekend was a different situation.

Josh and I have been on an Owyhees kick, as evidenced by the fact that all of my recent posts contain a reference of an Owyhees adventure. This past Saturday, we treked out to somewhere in the Owyhees for a bike ride. The first little misadventure occured while we were trying to get to where we would begin the ride and we found ourselves on a scary person's private property. The signage in the Owyhees needs a great deal of improvement, to put it mildly. Also to put it mildly, I was concerned that the luncatic hermit living in an isolated part of the Owyhees was going to shoot us dead and prop our decapitated heads onto poles as a warning to other trespassers. You may infer from my writing of this post that we came out of that encounter only a little ruffled, thank the little baby jesus. Following the encounter with crazy-man, I found myself driving my car over terrain poorly suited to my vehicle's schematics. Yet again, I was more than a little ruffled. But we managed to get our persons safe and sound to a spot at which to commence our ride.

As I said, signage in the Owyhees could use a bit of improvement. Josh and I are both decently observant people, yet both of us failed to notice this sign at the start of our ride. Though, if we had noticed it, we might not have been quite as awe-struck when we came upon this...

A herd of wild horses. In my Public Land Policy class, we've briefly discussed wild horse management policy, so I am somewhat familiar with it, but to my knowledge, I've never before seen wild horses. And on this ride, we came upon a few herds and it was quite remarkable. For the duration of the ride, I was singing to myself the U2 song about wild horses.

When we encountered them, we weren't sure the best response. One, we had no idea how they would react to us - - we've got experience running into stock animals like sheep and cattle, but no wild horses. So we kept our distance and allowed them to retreat, then slowly rode past until there was a good distance between us.

There were a lot of interesting relics and geological features along the ride. Above, some kind of headstone. There was also a particularly nifty volcanic rock section (no photo, unfortunately). It was sometime after we rode away from this headstone that we grew increasingly uncertain about our location. We stopped several times for Josh to consult the map.

We rode and rode. Eventually, we did two sets of steep descents and hike-a-bike ascents. And at the bottom of the second descent, Josh and I had paused to discuss something of great import, when we were silenced by the rather startling sound of all the air in one of Josh's tires suddently whooshing out.

That was disconcerting and sad-making.

We then hiked the bikes up a really steep hill and I got comfortable while Josh worked on fixing the tire. This took some time. Josh also took the opportunity to consult the map for the umpteenth time. From our vantage point, we were able to see two canyons and were wondering which canyons they were, as that information could have helped Josh to ascertain our location. After a while, a dude on an ATV sputtered by and was able to tell us that one of the canyons was Jump Creek. We asked the dude for advice on which way we should go, as we were at an intersection in which one road went down and another went up. We both felt uncertain about his advice, and decided to backtrack back to the car. Josh later consulted additional maps, including Google Earth, and realized that the dude had given us very bad directions and that if we had taken his advice, we would have been poorly off.

Once the tire was fixed, we had to re-hike-a-bike back up the steep hills we had just traversed and set off back from whence we had came.

For me, it was a spectacular ride. I was feeling really good and had a blast. I had also put my cyclecomputer on the bike, so I can say for certain that we rode 31 miles, our average speed was 8.6 mph, and our max speed was 27 mph. Not too shabby. It was about 3.5 hours of riding, but we had lots of stops, so we were out for at least an additional hour. For the drive back, we decided to take a different road so as to avoid driving by crazy-private-property man, and we discovered a much better route to access that part of the Owyhees.

Photos for this entry are at my Somwhere in the Owyhees photoset.

Posted by jennifer at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)