Hopkins 4K for Cancer

July 22, 2006

Goldfield, NV
98 miles

In the wee hours of the morning I woke up to my phone buzzing away at me. After a day where I got to hold a conversation with a 92-year old WWII Army veteran and University of Michigan grad and biked 100 miles…who could possibly be calling me at 3:30 in the morning? As I got my bearings back it occurred to me that the buzzing was my alarm going off, today was my day to blast everyone awake with a bit of music and watch everyone give me the evil eye as they too are awoken at some ungodly hour in the middle of the currently cool desert. To our west is Death Valley, separating the two of us are the Funeral Mountains. To the east lies Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site. To our north and south lie a few hundred miles of uninviting desert terrain. We ate breakfast and for the first time the whole trip we actually left at first light in the hopes of beating the midday heat. The heat was intense that day and there were very few chances for shade. We rolled into lunch at what appeared to be a shop of some kind that was under construction, it was the only building in a 20 mile radius. We knocked a few times and when we didn’t receive an answer we camped out on the porch and ate and slept due to pure exhaustion from the heat. I awoke from my nap an hour later when the husband and wife that owned the shop came outside and saw 15+ bikers on their doorstep. Apparently they hadn’t heard us knocking earlier. They talked with us for a while and wished us luck. Soon a rainstorm could be seen on the horizon to the south and a couple groups went ahead to beat it as it was heading north in our direction. My group with Jake and Kaylin decided to let the storm come closer and ride the leading edge in hope that it would block the sun’s rays as we rode the last 40 miles into the ghost town of Goldfield, NV. The three of us cruised the rest of the way in complete comfort as the others either got baked by the sun or got poured on as the storm overtook them before the could reach the elementary school. Goldfield’s population is only 440 (half of the entire county) but those people know how to cook. There was a lot of food on that table when we started and by the time I went up for seconds there was maybe 2 slices of the meatloaf left. I was the first to go through the dinner line that night and I would have swore we would be eating that meatloaf through the rest of the week because there was so much but it was so good that it was gone in no time. That night I walked around the town on my own to take in the cool night air and for the first time I got a sense that we were winding down our trip. California is ahead of us, the rest of the country is behind us, time to clip in and enjoy the ride.

~Ryan S