Being someone actively devoid of silly holiday traditions I chose the past few days to get the fuck out of Bend-Tourist Mecca and head into the desert. The plan was to get some ideas for trips based on the KLR and to see how the roads in the area matched the scant data available. Not well, I came to find. That will be a task with the bike after the winter. Ride the shit out of the desert with a GPS and load all that data into Open Street. Holy fuck, that was a hoot! A greater understanding of how that place was an inland sea some millennia ago instilled itself in my head after 2 days of desperate plowing down “roads” wondering which sludge hole was going to be the death of Mighty Whitey.

This was one of the small ones. One went for 500+ meters and damn near swallowed MW.

I shall pause the narrative at this point to publicly give a massive shout out to the engineer from Fuji Heavy Industries who, in the mid 70’s, came up with the concept that lead to the Subaru AWD wagon. This being my 4th Soob, I can attest to their  durability and insane dependability. I’ve hammered the complete shit out of all of mine and have never been left hanging. The fact that nothing broke this trip is stunning given the number of rocks hit, ditches jumped and super sludge ponds plowed through.

Good on ya, Subaru!

 

 

 

 

Just being out in the middle of nowhere was worth it, however. Not being a fan of most people, the desert in winter is an excellent choice of places to be.

Plenty good exploring got done and the camping was tops!

First night…

Annnnnnnd second.

This was my favorite place the whole trip. Why, you may ask? Well, let me tell ya, pardner! The name. Strictly the name.

Which is?!?!?

JEW VALLEY.

No shit, Jew Valley.

Not a Jew was sighted, which brought about some severe disappointment. Unless my sister is right and we’re Jews, then a Jew was sighted. In the mirror. Not what I was hoping for. I wanted to see some fucking hardscrabble Hasids in their dumb fucking wool jammies and curly locks working it. Building fence and whatnot. Nope, just a watering hole, sage and way too much slop disguised as roads. Fuck.

There was a little sun, usually a few hours in the morning followed by overcast and rain, sleet, snow, hail and odd combos of all the above at times. Beautiful. I highly recommend no one ever try this sort of thing. Keeps the rabble out of my goddamn desert.

Smooch!

Rotella.