Alturas to Susanville (California)

Alturas to Chester
So unfortunately due to the forest fires, we have had to re-route to the town of Susanville. Originally, we were supposed to bike to Cassel in order to make our way into Lassen National Park. The road connecting the park to Cassel is closed without any guarantees on when they will open. So Susanville was 105 miles from Alturas, and it consisted of being on the same road for 99.6 miles.

The first 40 miles were real good as we got out early to enjoy the mild winds and temperature. The highlight came with singing a fun camp song with Amelia all the way up our first mountain pass. We passed through many small towns with populations in the double digits that had the most a café & general store. I was getting pretty crazy & clumsy by the time our first lunch came around. The lunch stop was completely in the middle of nowhere at an old abandoned shop with the scariest looking bathrooms outside. I chose to use the rocks and trees instead and headed out from lunch.

The winds really started to pick up between first and second lunch as we attempted to protect ourselves! We were in a group of six with hitting us from the west that was blowing us from side to side. Chris did a great job of having us bike side by side in groups of three with the person to the right taking the majority of the wind. We chaged positions to share taking the brunt of the wind, and it helped us.

The highlight of this leg was after a long stretch of downhill where Skennelly had a couple of flats within two miles. So were biking alone laughing at the severity of the wind when a cop just randomly stopped us. So we had no idea what was going on but we realized this would be a rememberable moment with cops. His first question for us was if we had seen bikers going nude on the road. Lucky for me, this day I had not chosen the act and I was honest to the cop that it was not Sarah or I. The cop though did not understand what was going because we were the third group of riders he stopped to find out why we had been called in for naked bicyclists. So I educated the officer about the significance of what we call the “naked mile.” He was more intrigued than mad at us, and basically just asked me to spread the message to “keep our clothes on my county(Modoc).”

Sure enough at second lunch, I was able to find the culprit of the doing as we shared some laughs. The cop was basically stopping every packs of riders to tell us to just keep not get naked without any punishments. We shared laughs at a quick second lunch and headed on our way back into the wind for the last 25 miles. As we headed down for the first strech of these miles, we headed down a hill with wind gusts blowing us back. It felt like we were going uphill, come on what the heck!

So we kept our spirits high through constant gossiping and laughing. The second highlight of the day was having a cattle truck pass us, and get hit by a water like substance. We had our ideas of how contaminated we might have just become but tried not to put too much thought into it.

As we made it into Susanville after a long day, we all celebrated knowing it was our last century of the whole trip. The church was pretty basic but I think I had the coldest hose shower of the trip in the back, and even I could not take it. We treated ourselves after the shower by buying a tub of ice cream for a big group to share. It was absolutely disgusting in hindsight but felt so good at the time. Funny fact about the city is that it holds one of the biggest state prisons which is the basis for its economy. A majority of its citizens either work at the prison, just got out of prison or have family members who are prisoners.