Tremonton was a morning’s ride from Logan and the last supply depot on my route for going on 300 miles. It looked uncannily like the Mexican border town in Touch of Evil. Muddy pick-ups clogged the main street and blew dust-laden exhaust through the open doors of bars and stores whose names ended in ‘o’s’. But for a few adobe farms widely dispersed in the flatlands before the Blue Spring Hills, civilisation effectively ended at the town’s western perimeter marked by I-84. The earth became progressively more parched and cracked as the road dog-legged towards the salt desert. Fields of wild grasses were speckled with white, like the fine dusting from an autumn snowfall. The tarmac took another ninety degree turn and a turquoise hatband appeared, wobbling beneath a heavy crown of blue-grey haze. I had reached the north shore of the Great Salt Lake and could feel the heat cranking up. The mucky white beach was animated by small whirlwinds of salt rising between three and fifteen metres into the air. I was entering a landscape where the extremities of nature were not to be trifled with, particularly not on this day. According to the radio, June 11th was going to be the hottest day of the year.
At Lampo Junction, where my road turned off into the salt desert, a curious noise like the toot of a steam engine emanated from the west. It seemed to come from behind a ridge where there was nothing but a vast expanse of wilderness and the Golden Spike National Historical Park, the objective of my long detour from the Bear River Valley trail. The spike was the last track pin driven into the most famous railroad in the country, and the heritage centre celebrated the route’s important contribution to the story of westward expansion. According to my map, however, the lines had been ripped up decades ago, and the toot was too cute to belong to a ghost train.
During the period of great migrations, the call to link the eastern and western seaboards of America with a railroad grew ever louder. Aside from the internal benefits for a country the width of a continent, there was money to be made out of the Far East if the U.S. could drive a wedge between Europe and the Orient. As John Frémont observed, ‘America will be between Asia and Europe, the golden vein which runs through the history of the world will follow the track to San Francisco, and the Asiatic trade will finally fall into its last and permanent road.’
In 1862, President Lincoln signed the act which provided for a continuous rail and telegraph line from the railhead at the Missouri through to the Pacific. It was to be built by two competing companies meeting somewhere in the middle. From Sacramento, the Central Pacific Railroad had the herculean tasks of crossing the Sierra Nevadas and part of the Rockies. From Omaha, the Union Pacific Railroad would forge west across the prairies and into the mountains. Construction was subsidised by Washington proportionate to whether they were laying on level ground, high plateaus or through the mountains, and from the start the project was riddled with corruption and sleaze. The two companies went head to head in a race which guaranteed the quality of the track fell hostage to the urgency for quantity. Covering distance brought in the bucks, and bold-faced lies about the nature of the terrain were told to federal funders 2,000 miles from gentle inclines paid for as mountains.
From Lampo Junction, my road wound steeply up to a saddle back. On the left, a knuckle of Promontory Ridge rose over 2,100 metres before plummeting down to the lake at a little over 1,200. On my right, deep scars in the backbone of the Promontory Mountains were evidence of the complicity of the two railroad companies. Parallel railbeds had been cut into the ridge where the lines overlapped. Where a col dipped below the grade, the Central Pacific had infilled and built an embankment while the Union Pacific constructed a trestle bridge, no longer standing. Before the location of the historic meeting was decided, the two companies had passed each other, continuing to earn dodgy money. Often grading crews of the two railroads were working so close to each other, nitro explosions by one gang would rain down rocks on the other.
Beyond the ridge, Promontory Hollow opened out and I found myself back in sagebrush country with a grit railbed running beside me. Another, louder, toot echoed around the hollow, though there was nothing man-made in the landscape save barbed wire and tarmac. The road took a left, flowed over gentle undulations, then crossed a couple of rail lines. A magnificent steam locomotive emerged from a shunting shed hidden in the foothills and moved towards the Golden Spike Visitor Center, where a second immaculate engine waited.
Twenty years after the Forty-Niners set out from Independence, the two railroads officially joined up at Promontory Hollow. Where the visitor’s centre now stands, the last spike was driven home at a ceremony captured in the classic wet plate by A.J. Russell and relayed down telegraph lines to Washington (where they cheered) and San Francisco (where a banner proclaimed, ‘California Annexes the United States’). The one item missing from the small exhibition was the eponymous golden spike, but the real stars of the show were the steam engines. Faithful in every detail, these gleaming reproductions of the two locos in the black and white picture were a sight to behold. The Central Pacific’s Jupiter was a polished blue with shiny brass fittings and a large black stack shaped like a funnel. For the Union Pacific, No. 119 was a stylish matt black and red, heavy on the brass and gold trim, with a pipe stack and white-walled wheels. They were lined up, cow-catcher to cow-catcher, as for the original photo shoot.
Finding them stuck in the middle of nowhere on an isolated couple of miles of track emphasised the extraordinary nature of America’s great endeavour. Never mind that the Central Union had to scale higher peaks and blast through more miles of granite than any previous railroad builder in the world. In the rolling prairies, the task was difficult enough. Neither the wood for ties or sleepers, iron for rails and spikes, nor food and drink for the thousands of labourers were readily available in the Great American Desert. Everything had to be shipped up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, then carted or railed overland. As historical markers on my ride up the Platte River Valley indicated, crews and tracks were sitting targets for aborigines who rightly believed the ‘Ironhorse’ spelled an end to their way of life. Then there were the formidable social and policing problems presented by the ‘Hell on Wheels’ — the rolling city bringing up the rear, peopled by gamblers, prostitutes, saloon keepers and pimps who leeched off the rail crews.
I planned to follow the old railbed across the desert. Producing a BLM map, the ranger at the visitor centre said, “You can ride the grade all on through to Lucin and the steepest it gets is two per cent. The route’s fairly obvious. You should find water at Locomotive Springs.”
In a wasteland with no obvious landmarks a stranger might identify from a quick glance at his map, I wasn’t sure “fairly obvious’” and the word “should’” were particularly reassuring.
“Have you cycled it?” I asked him.
“You kiddin’?”
I sped off down the gravel track beside the railbed, excited at the prospect of entering the salt desert. A liquid sun sat on top of the North Promontories to my right, and the blue hills of Dolphin Island rose like Dracula’s castle from the lake ahead. Round the headland, the stone track swung off left to Promontory Ranch. Except for forty head of cattle and low hills furry with wild spring rye, there was nothing else out here. It seemed America’s craving for beef encouraged people to farm in the most inhospitable of places. Throughout my crossing of the wasteland, I was to come across indications that optimists had tried and failed in their efforts to make the desert pay.
Where the grit track turned off I carried straight on and joined the dirt railbed to curve north round Spring Bay. The lake was a fantasy painting framed in white depicting a milky doppelgänger of the eerie landscape above it. Silhouetted citadels of rock kept a look out for enemy movement over the dark blue hills, but the stillness of the evening was unnerving. A soft humming noise like somebody had left a computer on suggested something invisible was about. The railbed cut across the tip of the lake and disappeared under water. When it was laid, the lake wasn’t there. After a hundred of years of shrinkage, it was mysteriously filling up again. Keeping to the bank, I cut along a faint trace and punctured. Within seconds of stopping I was enveloped by as many mosquitoes as there are people in China. I had discovered the source of the humming and the nature of the enemy.
At sun-up the next morning I struck out across the white flats of the bay, throwing up a cloud of salt as I wove carelessly towards Monument Point. Pulling out a historic picture postcard bought at the visitor centre, I compared views. In the background were the distinctive stacks at the tip of the spit of land I was crossing. Where I stopped on the railbed, a man in the photo stood in front of Jupiter and a row of coaches. Behind us, a line of covered wagons were making their way west — the last of the ox powered migrants. Between the steam and the wagon trains, there was a second track in the picture whose railbed had since disappeared. The line from east to west was a single track but, at regular intervals, sidings had been laid so engines could cross. Travelling as an ‘amateur emigrant’ in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson spent many an uncomfortable hour in these sidings waiting for the eastern bound locomotive to pass. He noted that those carriages leaving El Dorado were ‘as crowded as our own’.
Beyong the rock outcrop, railbed and dirt track ran ruler-straight to a dust patch where the town of Kelton once stood twenty miles away. Under an unfiltered sun, the heat was beginning to give me cause for concern. Salt dust carried on a gentle south-westerly accelerated dehydration and every five minutes I had to sip water. By mid-morning it was evident I had sorely underestimated my liquid requirements, and the four mile diversion to Locomotive Springs proved fruitless. The spring was brackish and ringed with salt like a Margarita. When the argonauts drank from alkali springs, they invariably suffered a bad stomach for which their antidote was to eat spinach. I was right out of spinach and over a hundred miles from the next watering hole. With just three litres left to take me through a scorching hot day, a night, and the morning it would take me to reach Montello, Nevada, I was pushing it.
In the distance, unnatural white rectangles glowed above the scrub. As I crept closer, a cluster of caravan roofs revealed themselves and a woman on a trail bike screamed past me, showering me with sand. In a ragged circle of tents, caravans and 4x4s, hairy men bent over hairy machines, tinkering and tuning. Their molls lay about in shorts and bikini bras, reading bikers’ mags and gently roasting. They were a trail bike club from Logan, out to rip up the desert. One of their number had ridden all over the salt wasteland and knew something about the way to Lucin the BLM didn’t.
“It ain’t obvious at all,” he said, contradicting the ranger. “Stick to the railbed until it gives out, then switch to the track. At the first junction take a right. It don’t look like y’ought, but if’n y’don’t…” He drew his finger across his neck. “That right’s, like, crucial. The track’s shit but it’ll take you back to the railbed in the Baker Hills, then you’re clear.”
With my water bottles brimming and better directions from somebody who knew the terrain, I rode away confident I would complete the crossing without a hitch. The surface of the railbed changed to crushed coke and crossed depressions over short trestles built by the original grading crews. A dirt road diverted around each rickety bridge, off onto the playa, then back up to the embankment. One diversion ran through a large puddle the width of the track. Not thinking, I rode into it. My bike stopped dead and threw me into the milky mud. We emerged covered in white slip — the sort of liquid clay potters pour into moulds. By the time we reached the crucial turn-off, we were fired and ready for glazing.
I was burning up and had to find shelter, but the sun was giving a good impression of being immediately overhead and the only shade was under me and the bike. The landscape was smooth and rolling, totally bereft of the sheer wall of rock needed to cast any depth of shadow. The rail embankment cast the slimmest of shadows. I scrambled down, dug my heels in the base and flopped against its side with my toes sticking out in the sun. Immediately sweat gushed from every pore. I allowed myself ten minutes to cool down and rehydrate. With about eighty miles to go before hitting tarmac, I had to make the best of the lethal conditions. It was the fourth day of the weather cycle and another thunder storm was on the cards. Unless the heatwave was more than a blip, tomorrow it might pour down. I could find myself spending up to three days pushing through glutinous mud to escape the desert — three days I hadn’t the supplies for.
The railbed curved wide and gently climbed into the Matlin Mountains. In a cutting, old sleepers had been dumped at the side of the track, and tin cans, rusty spikes and bent spoons lay on the jigger. Hovering in thin air above a distant ruled line, the flat bottom of Dolphin Island provided the clue that the Great Salt Lake was somewhere up ahead, indecipherable from the sky. In the scorched pan before it, the plumes of dust devils looked like the beams from disco lights mounted in the desert floor. If the weatherman reckoned Utah was bubbling at 45°C, I reckoned it had to be a degree or two higher where I was.
Twenty miles on, having wound through the Terrace Mountains, a graveyard appeared on my left. Covered in spring rye and impounded by a modern fence, the cemetery contained a small white headstone and a contorted wire cross. I could think of worse places to leave my mortal remains, but it was a hard road to travel for families to pay their respects. Despite a dramatic cross at the entrance made from old sleepers, I suspected the dearly departed were forgotten by everybody but their maker.
A little further on, a single plank of weathered timber stood erect above the sagebrush. It was all that remained of the largest rail town in Utah, born 1869, died 1910. A BLM sign explained that, at its largest, Terrace had between 200 and 2,000 residents, depending on whether you counted the Chinese population. I walked around finding broken crockery and shattered bricks, battered tin plates and rusting mugs. It took a major stretch of the imagination to picture an eight track marshalling yard and a town with a bustling main street, piped water from god knows where and people promenading through a civic park lined with trees. The only indication that anybody had ever settled here were large hollows in the ground, possibly the remains of where the Chinese lived, sensibly troglodyte like the Shoshoni.
Finding fewer than 600 of his white work force could be relied on to clock in each morning, Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific turned to the Chinese at home and abroad. They were an unknown quantity at this sort of labour, but Charles figured any nation capable of building the Great Wall had hidden strengths. Some came from the gold fields, where many of his white workers deserted to, but he ‘imported’ over 10,000 of them to work on the line and they proved to be a remarkable work force. They arrived already organised into gangs, usually from the same part of China and speaking the same tongue. Unlike the American and Irish navvies who worked for the Union Pacific, they were not prone to sickness. After a day’s work, they bathed. They only drank boiled water in the form of tea, and their diet was a sight more varied than the beef and potato staple of the white workers, who drank from streams. Inevitably the Chinese were paid less and allocated the most dangerous jobs. Around 1,200 died during the building of the railroad, but it was unlikely any lay beneath the shadow of the Christian crucifix made of rail ties. Aside from the racism which denied them access to town cemeteries, the Chinese community was well organised. A kind of insurance policy came with the loan to buy their passage across the Pacific. In the event of death, it provided for their body to be returned home.
Though it allowed me to admire their carpentry skills, flicking on and off the embankment to by-pass the bridges made for hard riding. After clambering over a particularly well preserved trestle near Watercress sidings, I noticed strands of something like rye trapped between my rear rim and the tyre. On closer inspection, the outer casing of the tyre had frayed in two places, shredding the wall into strands which revealed the kevlar mesh.
I paced back and forwards, cursing myself for not giving my bike a thorough overhaul back in Logan. Where was my head? With over 2,000 miles of wear in them, what was I doing in the middle of a desert without a spare tyre? Had the Panther whittled away more of my brain cells than I cared to admit?
As far as I could remember, Tremonton didn’t have a bicycle store, and it was over a hundred miles back to Logan which did. Ahead of me, the nearest town that might supply a tyre was Wells, Nevada, the same sort of distance away. If not, Elko was fifty miles further on. I could repair the tyre but a bandage was not going to get me far across this sort of terrain. I was in trouble.
At the end of the ripped up railroad, Lucin was another company town which had disappeared off the face of the earth. Beyond the X that marked the spot, a short-cut was laid in 1904 which forged straight across the Great Salt Lake, sealing the fate of the desert loop. West of the X, the modern railroad stuck to the original course of the Central Pacific through to Montello, then Wells, Elko, Winnemucca and points west to Sacramento. Once again, a railroad was going my way, at least as far as Winnemucca, where I would pull away from the main thrust of the California Trail to cross another forbidding cauldron.
Having spent the evening and morning repairing my tyre with an attention to detail worthy of a neurosurgeon, I followed the Southern Pacific railroad out of the salt pan. I could have drunk a swimming pool but had downed my last drop the night before. If the repair gave out, I had a full day’s walk to the nearest tap. The sooner I reached smooth tarmac the better. The railway line converged on Route 233 at Montello, Nevada, about twenty miles away, but after four, a sign saying, ‘Private: Trespassers Will Be Shot… DEAD’ spurred me to cut across to the road early, free ranging through sand dunes on a strength sapping trudge.
I had switched the frayed tyre to the front wheel and the patch appeared to be holding up. Riding the newly-laid pavement, two little bumps rebounded through my palms each time the wheel rolled over the dressings. Into a dry gulch and out again, I crossed the state line and the road became a horizontal plumline across a glaring expanse of nothing. Through binoculars I could make out a small copse of trees, but no Montello. A pick-up zoomed past. Fifteen minutes later I could still see it dead ahead. I was back in the land of distorted distances, where the foot of mountains forty miles away appeared no further off than half an hour’s ride.
The huddle of trees finally stepped back to reveal the village of Montello, ‘Pop: 193. El: 4880’. The highway clipped the village and was the only tarmac road in a crosshatch of rusty trailers and weathered bungalows. On one side was the railroad and some sheds. On the other, front street was a run-down motel, a gas station-cum-store, The Cowboy Bar, and a hundred yards of boarded up businesses. While I knocked back a couple of litres of water, the woman at the gas station told me the mishmash of residences were mostly retirement homes. Those who commuted worked in the slot joints, casinos and brothels of West Wendover, adjacent to the Utah border and handy for deviant Mormons. Aside from a little ranching and the surviving front street businesses, Montello’s only other gainful employment was to be found at the “cat house” or brothel. I was more taken aback to learn that the woman I was talking to was married to a rancher who came from Chelmsford, England.
In The Cowboy Bar and Café, two old boys were yanking the hell out of a couple of slot machines and knocking back Buds. Good rockin’ country music boomed from a live concert on the TV featuring a couple of artistes world famous in Nevada. A couple of hussies shoe-horned into Levis and Wonderbras jostled in behind me, taking time out from working on their back. While I waited for ham and eggs to appear, I studied the BLM map pinned to the wall next to a lurid portrait of Red Cloud, Chief of the Lacotas. The Forty-Niner’s route had taken them on a broad arc through present day Idaho, forty miles north of my line, then back south along Goose Creek to Thousand Springs Valley. I planned to rejoin the trail at Thousand Springs, over fifty miles across the other side of the Toano Range, the western backdrop to Montello. Checking the contours and track, I decided it was pure madness to attempt the crossing. My injured tyre might survive the sands of the desert, but the rocks of the mountain pass would surely rip it to shreds.
My alternative was to stick to smooth tarmac. Ultimately all tracks and roads led to the Humboldt River, where the different branches of the California Trail merged to cross the final wildernesses. I ran my finger along the river valley, my spirits sinking lower with every mile. From where I picked up the line at Oasis to where I left it, 200 miles west at Winnemucca, there was just one road — I-80, another flaming interstate. There were short sections of country roads but, as with the interstate to Casper, I had no way of knowing if they linked up. The only other possibility was to take the rail company’s service track along the valley line, but my morning’s trudge didn’t auger well for that idea.
I set off down Route 233 to join the dreaded interstate. Beyond the rail crossing the road deteriorated. Sprayed with tar and sprinkled with grit, loose pebbles had been swept into annoying little levees snaking across my path. Within a couple of miles, the last vestiges of the dressings were flayed from the bottom of my tyre. The walls remained fine, but I had other problems. For some reason, I couldn’t get my legs working properly. They flopped beneath me like a string puppet’s, bereft of all strength. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth and a peculiar crust sealed my lips. Despite downing a full breakfast and several litres of water, I was still severely dehydrated. At the top of a col, ten miles from Montello, I took a quick break in the shade of a juniper tree. The moment my head hit the sand, I fell into a deep sleep.
All things considered, my body had remained remarkably healthy throughout the second stage of my American odyssey. I hadn’t experienced sickness or sunburn, been stung or badly bitten, and my left knee had settled down to being weak but usable. I rode in fear of catching encephalitis or some stomach bug from the ghastly tap water but so far, so good. If any organ was experiencing terminal breakdown, it was my brain. Perpetually locking horns with the Panther, I was suffering from repetitive head-butting injury.
Three hours, a good siesta and ten miles further on, I was standing at the junction with the interstate feeling physically improved but mentally ill-prepared for the 200 mile grind ahead of me. I honked up the slip road, entered the flow of traffic and was immediately faced with a 600 metre climb up through Pequop Pass. At the summit, I looked back and for the first time had a clear view of the Great Basin’s metre. Bleak, empty deserts were followed by high broken backbones, followed by more bleak desert and another unimpressive range aligned north to south. So it went on through Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. The panorama was made the more disheartening by the two thick black lines of the interstate ruled straight to the horizon like twentieth century Nazca Lines. Purgatory was a better name for this blind corner of God’s Own Country.
I charged down the mountain, my front wheel shimmying wildly under the distorting influence of the repairs. Reverting to the unenthusiastic plod which now typified my pedal across Nevada, I crept across the desert floor of Independence Valley. In the middle of the wasteland was a small compound of white dormitory blocks. Within a heavily fenced compound, a group of men in white fatigues stood smoking outside a white blockhouse. A couple noticed me and pointed, but nobody waved. A large sign said, ‘Prison Area: Nevada Dept. of Prisons’. I fancied the sight of me inching across the desolation momentarily made their incarceration a lot more bearable.