Bicycling Pyramid Lake

The first time I went to Pyramid Lake was as a more-or-less adult, freshly married and at the ranch after the Peace Corps, I had dropped Heidi off to fly somewhere and bought my first-ever art supplies and on an impulse I pulled off of I-80 at Wadsworth and drove over the hill and along the south side of the lake for a little while. I sat and breathed in that giant madness of ditching the P.C. and sketched, but what I was really doing was experimenting with the newness of awakening consciousness. But I drove on without even scratching the surface of the vast center of being and unbeing that is the lake itself.

The stone mother at dawn

Many years passed, many other places (and a divorce) intervened before I went to Pyramid Lake again, this time with my new friends from Reno. I splashed in the lake and constructed a sculpture of flotsam found at the lake near where the Truckee enters at Dixon. And afterward ate Indian for the first time with that cute girl Renee who I was just getting to know.

Artwork on the shore

That started my love affair and I began to explore the lake. I had my first solo overnight bike trip there with Coco and my brand new B.O.B. a year or so later. I left the Honda on the highway at the Pyramid Road and tried riding to the Pyramid. The results weren't inspiring, I couldn't control the Surly on the washboards and wasn't at all too sure this was a very good idea anyway. We only made it a few miles and then with the sun getting low (I hadn't even started until very late) I decided screw this and made camp in a little swell near the closest tufa formations I could find. But then Coco and I climbed up the tufa and into a perfect golden sunset over the lake and the Virginia Mountains. I thought that was enough and happily made dinner and retired to the tent, but Coco had other ideas, it seems the plain where we camped was a smorgasbord of smells and she got more excited as it got darker. This being when I realized that I hadn't brought her leash. So I fashioned a bit of twine and we walked, or rather she pulled me, down and around for a little while. This being more than enough, I retired to the tent with Coco in unwilling tow, I fell asleep to the barking coyotes outside. I woke up a few hours later in the pitch black and felt something was wrong. I felt, up down, front back, she was gone. I was terrified; she thinks she's tough, but she'd never really met a coyote or just plain disappeared. I was desperate as I stood naked in the dark calling for her, certain she wasn't going to come. And then she appears not at all worried or contrite. In the morning the fresh light washed away my fear of the dark and we walked down to the water and I watched and tried to follow the myriad paths of the little critters that Coco had been so interested in the night before.

Tufa sunset at Camp Coco en Fuga

Which brings me here, coasting into the Pyramid Lake Shop, one of three bicyclists errant fresh from crossing the ATV barrens and watching a glider slide skyward as we neared the gliderport in Winnemucca Valley. The store is a throwback, a Blue Highway remnant nearly empty other than a skulking motorcyclist in all black and a man with a giant smile attached to a cracked face amidst a pile of books and paperwork and watching a giant-screen version of Braveheart on the flatscreen (can never escape that anymore William Least Heat Moon). Wherya headin'? Wherya been? Do you do this all the time? Are you part of a club? We smiled and answered but couldn't match that weatherbeaten grin just like my dad's. He lit up at our journey and we relaxed and talked while we cooked hot sandwiches in the microwave and filled waterpacks in sink in the back. His middle-age daughter was in charge of the cash register and he was retired but for his study (a good looking encyclopedia of Native American culture or folklore the only one I could spy).

At the Pyramid Lake Shop

He infected us with his glow and we reemerged into the glare and glided up the hill and over to the giant shining lake. We stopped and toasted the lake and the pyramid, toasted this entire system beginning with snow on Mount Rose, Desolation, Job's Sister, through glittering Lake Tahoe and the Truckee, across the meadows and into the desert to here. A nearly island system backed against Sierra and Basin. We have been driven by auto culture into neverending and omnipresent lines, but I only need close my eyes and I see it, the quiet roads wind whispering while people reemerge, and row and draft and leave no trash or exhaust where now we only see boxes of future-trash and gas, where the store does a brisk business with people buying fuel (fuel = food) and running with their children in the street with no fear. I got a taste, coasting along the highway bends while Anaho Island, the Pyramid, Howitzer Slide and the plunging face of Tohakum Peak unfolded across the mostly unbroken lake surface. We hit gravel again and started to see the fantasy landscape of the Needles. We stopped under the giant cottonwood oasis along the roadside, where we realized we were not in fact going to make it to the Bonham Hotsprings that night and decided to start looking around for camping. We pedaled onward and then settled in the magical floating tufa islands of Monument Rock, where we camped as the sun set over the Virginia Mountains.

This is the meeting place of the ancients, of breathing, trembling civilization. Created in boiling mud, stewing in a vast inland sea into palaces. I feel the origins of human stories sitting here in the smoothworn bowls as the sky darkens and ribbons of stars become visible and dance, how they have sparked our desire for knowledge and understanding, those heavens. We stretch by moonlight and recall shapes and our own shadows.