Day 2/June 9
Rattlesnake Ridge to Zenia
49 miles
Total So Far: 94 miles
I sleep until midnight, at which point I am awoken to the acute sensation of being on a leaky raft. I just watched Moana the other day so I’ll use the metaphor of finally being at sea but then being shipwrecked. Like my sleeping bag is the fucking ocean. Nd it’s implausibly warm, so warm I can’t get comfortable and have to take off my down jacket. After that I manage to go to sleep again—but only for two hours and then I’m awake and I’m freezing and hyperventilating and my sleeping bag is soaked. I’ve nestled myself into the corner farthest from the hood, and spend three minutes worrying about rain versus asphyxiation then stick my head out the tarp and inhale the frigid downpour. It really does feel like the ocean.
I put my down jacket back on, under my rain jacket, but in the process make both of them even wetter than they were before. My sleeeping bag is actively dripping onto me, but only my face and feet are exposed and the rest of me is in rain pants or a rain coat so the only thing I’m really worried about is the cold—this sleeping bag is down and can’t hold in heat when it’s this wet. Hypothermia, I’ve read, usually ensues at temperatures between 30 and 50 degrees. What if I catch hypothermia? Or drown in my sleeping bag? I move my head closer to the front of the sleeping bag but this isn’t much better, I’m still surrounded by the tarp and can’t seem to catch my breath and now it’s even colder than before. Grow up Zeke. You’re not going to asphyxiate. I burrow deep into my sleeping bag, curled up into myself. The rain subsides for a little bit and I fall asleep for another two hours, then wake up when it starts again at four. I check the weather app on my phone. It’s supposed to have stopped by four. Now the weather app says I’ll stop at five, but at five it’s still going and by six I force myself out of my doubling boat and into a drizzling, frozen morning. My clothes aren’t that wet, thankfully, and I do a series of jumping jacks to get warm. But whenever I move the waterlogged bottoms of my leggings cling to my legs and I barely manage to flop onto my sleeping mat to eat breakfast. There’s no why I can do some long detour today without contracting hypothermia. I’m going to have to go through the gate, tresspassing or no tresspassing. Anyway, it’s only 12 miles to Dinsmore.
And so, after eating as quickly as I possibly can, I take my bags off my bike, toss them over the gate marked with NO TRESSPASSING and then hoist my bike over too. I hesitate for a second before climbing into the person’s property and then remember that it’s seven in the morning and I’m standing around in thirty five degree weather on a ridge wasting time that could be spent in a warm store.It can’t be that far, right? I’ll arrive in time for second breakfast.
My premonitions about it being all downhill to Dinsmore have to do with me having only downloaded enough of the Arcata to Mad River Google Maps segment to see the topolines north of here. To the southeast, I’m left to guess. Since I’m at 4,000 feet up on a high ridge and the Van Duzens Valley, which I can see way way way below me, has Dinsmore in it, I guess that I’ll be going all downhill. And indeed, the ride begins angling steeply downhill. If this continued I’d lose the 4,000 feet in 4 miles, not twelve. The trail is rocky and very steep and not remotely like a road—a bit of trampled grass cutting down a vertical hillside. I pass by a house and a cow corral very quickly and then plunge into a thicket of dense, dripping forest. After this, the trail decides it’s time to change it up and starts going uphill as steeply as it went down. I try to ride up, make it half a yard, and then lose balance and careen backwards through dense mud. I get off and push. 
And so goes the morning. I labor up unspeakably steep hills and descend them along rocky, barely rideable hillsides. At least I’m not cold anymore. And it’s ridiculously beautiful up on these hillsides absolutely alone, with the glaring bulk of South Fork Mountain on the left and the Van Duzens Valley on the left, with rain clouds steaming out of it and into the intermittent sunlight. 
The only problem is that obviously it’s not just one property in the twelve miles to Dinsmore, it’s eight so that’s eight gates I have to lift my bike over and this gets tiring very quickly. Sometimes, I might get lucky and find an unlocked gate secured just with a carabiner, or a gate high enough I can slide my bike under but most of the gates necesitare hauling the bags over and then returning for the bike. Pedals and metal gates do not mix well, in case anyone was wondering.
So it’s 11:45 by the time I reach the intersection with Bear Creek Road and finally begin my descent into Dinsmore. The road is muddy and too steep to really be that fun but I don’t care. I made it! Through the private property! The Van Duzens Valley! I’ve been fantasizing about teaching Dinsmore since my fatigue set in the day before and when I round the last switchback and see the three ramshackle buildings set off from Highway 36, I register a solid Organic Bakery/Cafe on the Happymeter. To make matters even better I have a nice little chat with a man walking down the highway who introduces himself as Jesse, the same name as my brother, which makes me feel somehow less homesick. The man looks nothing like my younger brother—he’s six feet tall and has a blonde beard, for one thing—but he spells his name the same way (“lotsa people spell it with an ie or a y. Does your brother spell it with an e? He’s does? Oh my lord!”)
The Dinsmore Store, however, lowers my Happy-meter level drastically. There’s no attached cafe, like I had assumed, and not even any tables the way there are in many country stores in others towns bereft of other infrastructure. I pace the aisles, decide I should make a stab at resupply because there’s no service here and I have no idea how far away Covelo is, so I gather a scant assortment of food, some of which I plan to eat for lunch, to the counter.
“Ertyehh,ixfi” the cashier says once all the items are ringed up.
“Sorry?” I ask, handing him my credit card on autopilot.
“Sign there,” he says, a little bit more clearly, pointing to the printed receipt and I do. He points at the tab. “I said $37.65.”
“Wait, how much?” There’s no way this food would last me more than a day.
“I said thirty seven dollars and sixty five cents. It’s on the receipt.”
Stunned, I carry my food out to a purple bench near the store and try my seat to find contentment. Dinsmore is as beautiful as the rest of the Van Duzens Valley, made up of just the store and an attached gas station with a sign reading NEXT SERVICES 98 MILES and beyond that just the tall scrape of the Trinity Alps and a massive sky. It’s freezing cold, and I wear all my layers while I eat, wishing there was somewhere slightly warmer to sit. After I’m done, i return to the store to fill my water bottles so I can begin washing the mud off my bike.
“I wouldn’t drink the tap water here,” a different cashier says. “Tell you what, I’ll buy you a gallon of bottled water and you can use what’s still in your bottles or wash your bike.”
I thank her, wash my bike, lay out my sleeping bag to dry, and sit down again to write. I manage to write for a while before the same cashier who charged me $37.65 for the food retuns outside and points to a sign above me that I didn’t notice that says ‘No Loitering.’ Whatever. It’s already 2:00 anyway.
Pavement! Flat pavement! I know that I planned this ride specifically to avoid pavement as frequently as possible, but it’s still nice to be able to relax for a little bit, especially once I turn off of Highway 36 onto the empty asphalt of Van Duzens Road, snaking south into the low wooded foothills of the Trinity Alps. There are houses lining the lower end of The Valley, but they fall away as I climb, gradually farther into the mountains and eventually leave the river behind to snake across the drainages along some mountain slope. It’s gotten warm enough that I’m just wearing. Long sleeve shirt and leggings over my T-shirt and bike shorts and even though I’m shivering on some of the descents, it’s still very nice to know that I have more layers to put on if it gets colder. Van Duzens Road is the easiest riding I’ve had so far on this trip, but it doesn’t take long for me to get fatigued and I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening dragging my ass across the southwestern edge of the Six Rivers National Forest. The stunning scenery of the morning and early afternoon has fallen away, replaced with dense third growth pine forest and occasional views of low mountains, swathed with gray beetle kill. I reach the south end of the forest—about a mile from the village of Zenia—around seven and waste a half hour calling ‘hello’ at an abandoned fire station to see if anyone there will open the station and let me charge my phone but there isn’t anyone so i cook dinner luxuriously on the picnic tables and lay out my sleeping bag, suddenly realizing that it is nowhere near dry enough to retain all that much heat and that the temperature has again dropped to the low forties or high thirties.
I’m wearing all my layers, including my shoes, when I get in my sleeping bag and even though I’m still cold, fatigue forces me asleep within minutes.
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