Hualapai Mountain Road, Where the Desert Quits

Fourteen miles out of town the desert quits. That is the only way I have ever been able to explain Hualapai Mountain Road to anybody who has not been up it. You leave Kingman at the light by the tracks with the heat still coming up off the asphalt, you start climbing, and somewhere around five thousand feet the creosote gives out and there are pines standing where no pine has any business standing. Same county. Same tank of gas. Twenty minutes.

I went up late in the day with the light already going long across the valley. The Glide is not built for that road and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is fourteen miles of switchbacks with a wall on one side and air on the other, and a bagger wants a wider line than the road is willing to give. Second gear most of the way, the big twin lugging along at an idle it does not care for, and me sitting up straight taking it a corner at a time like a man carrying something full to the brim.

The temperature is the part nobody believes until they do it. It came off a degree at a time, and then all at once I rode through a band of air that had to be fifteen degrees cooler and smelled like pine pitch and dust getting wet somewhere. I have been up that road probably forty times and that band still gets me. You do not earn it, you just ride into it.

Pulled in at the wide spot below the campground and shut it down. There was an elk standing off in the trees maybe sixty yards out, doing me the courtesy of not caring at all. Down in town nothing had happened all day but heat. Up there the wind was moving the tops of the pines and I could hear it going for what felt like a mile in both directions.

A fellow came down from the campground in a pickup with a load of firewood and stopped alongside with the window down. Said he has a cabin up there his dad put up in the seventies and he comes every weekend from September until the snow closes it. Asked me if the bike did all right on the grade. I told him it does fine as long as I do not ask it to hurry. He laughed and said that is the only way anything gets up that hill, and went on down.

Coming back I let it coast most of the way with the engine doing nothing but holding me back. You feel the heat come up to meet you from about three thousand feet down, a layer at a time, and by the bottom the air was back to what it had been all afternoon and the town lights were on. Fifteen degrees warmer in fourteen miles is the closest thing to time travel I know of out here. Summer is still sitting on Kingman. It just is not sitting on everything any more.