HWY 395 by Chopper
The Eastern Sierras, one of my favorite places to explore. It’s an easy motorcycle or car trip: a step into the wild and out of one’s comfort zone. Our tradition over the past four years is to ride our stubborn old Harley Davidsons up Highway 395. It is a gathering to enjoy time with our best friends and to get the taste of being free.
This last trip was July 4th weekend, 2019. It was special for me. Before leaving for the trip, I had packed all of my belongings. I had gotten myself ready to move across the country to Charlotte, NC with my girlfriend at the time and our dog. This was our last hoorah before leaving and likely one of the last 395 trips with my chopper homies for a while. Sadly, I wasn’t able to fly out for the 2020 trip due to our current pandemic.
It was also special for me because it was the first long trip on my recently finished Shovelhead chopper, and I had a feeling it was going to end up being difficult at some point. I’ve been wrenching on my own bikes for a few years now but still consider myself a novice. The almost inevitable breakdown was daunting, and I decided to forget my usual camera gear to leave room for tools and a few spare parts... Instead of my bulky DSLR, I bought a two pack of disposable cameras from a Walgreens in Ridgecrest, CA. This wasn’t my first time shooting film, but this trip gave me the itch to pursue squandering my money on developing costs and cheap disposable cameras. I’ve been addicted to the rush of waiting on getting a roll of developed film back ever since...
The trip started out wild, I had met with my girlfriend the night before in Ridgecrest, CA. It’s a town off of the 395 that probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Naval Air Weapons Station “China Lake”. We were a day earlier than the group, so we decided we would ride into Death Valley National Park to kill time. We left Ridgecrest around 9am, my chopper ran great. Even in 110 degree weather it didn’t skip a beat! We stopped to check out a few of the picturesque scenes in Death Valley, but usually not for long. Even though it felt like getting blasted in the face by a blow dryer, it was a lot nicer moving on the bike than standing still in the blazing heat. We stopped for lunch around noon in Furnace Creek, and every TV in the joint had breaking news. It turned out that a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit Ridgecrest during the 2 hours that we were on our motorcycles and we didn’t feel a thing! We also learned that parts of the highway that we had literally JUST been riding on, suffered large cracks and lateral offset: meaning parts of the highway had shifted 3-5 feet! Feeling thankful and fortunate, we paid our tab, left the bar, and hopped back on our motorcycles. We started back on the 100 mile ride to Lone Pine, where we would be meeting up with the rest of the group.
With a group of this size there’s bound to be some lag time. The two of us had found a campsite not far from the main dirt road in the Alabama Hills. We tried making it as easy as possible, because we had a feeling the group would arrive after dark, which they did. While waiting on a large rock, with no supplies to make a campfire, slowly starting to doze off, we finally heard the beautifully distinct sound of multiple Harleys approaching in the distance. They were here! I ran down to my bike to signal to them with my headlight. There is no better feeling after waiting for hours in the sun than seeing all of your buddies roll up to the campsite on their badass choppers with a chase truck full of firewood and beers.
The next day the stoke was on high, we woke up immersed in the beauty of the Alabama Hills with Mount Whitney towering over us just to our west. It’s always crazy to me to think about how the lowest and highest elevations in America are Death Valley and Mount Whitney and they’re barely over 100 miles apart. From our campsite in the Alabama Hills we rode north to the “Honey Hole”, a cold spring swimming hole in an undisclosed location, mostly because I don’t remember exactly where it is… Rest assured, it was perfect, and we could’ve spent our entire trip hanging out there.
Instead we decided to keep moving north. We went a little further up towards Mammoth and found ourselves at Wild Willy’s Hot Springs, which was absolutely insane during the holiday weekend. Thankfully, we found a solo camper with a site, score! He let our rowdy group set up with him that night.
After getting settled we made the short walk in the dark to the hot springs. To our surprise we walked up to what looked like anywhere from 50-100 people standing huddled together in the pools completely naked! Later on we had learned that it was a tradition for these people because the 4th was the only day the group shared a day off of work together. Not something we expected to see, but we didn’t mind. They too just wanted to be free.
The rest of the trip is a little more of a blur to me, since there were more than a few beers drank and even a few more joints smoked. The next day, we spent more time at the “Honey Hole” and then rode just south of Lone Pine to Diaz Lake for our last night of camping. But I knew it was coming, as soon as I pulled into the campground for Diaz Lake my bike started running like hot garbage.
My buddy Danny helped me try and diagnose the problem, adjusting and readjusting pushrods, fiddling with the carburetor, replacing the points…trying to pinpoint the gremlin. To this day I’m not sure exactly what happened, but sadly I think it was something as simple as a fouled spark plug. I spent the next morning trying to kick the bike over and over with no avail. It was a Sunday, and the local Napa Auto Parts, owned by the AMCA legend “Napa Dave”, that would’ve probably had what I needed was... closed. So I packed my bike up in our van and said my goodbyes.
It wasn’t the perfect ending, but it ended up being the perfect trip and send off to the East Coast. I’m glad I opted to pack these two disposable cameras beforehand. Memories are forever, and so is film.
