WWDC

My friend John Blackburn and I set off in May of 1993 to ride our bikes from Los Angeles to the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference in San Jose. It had been a while since either us had ridden any great distance, so we decided to go there via the Owens River Valley through Yosemite. In one day.

After about an hour, I started getting uncomfortable riding without gloves. I hadn't been able to find my old ones, and I had been in a hurry, but now my hands were starting to complain, and there was a long road left ahead of us, so we zipped into a K-Mart that was freeway close, but they didn't have anything very appropriate. I bought two kinds of gloves: a pair of gardening work gloves (big enough, but not much help gripping the throttle) and a pair of batter's gloves (excellent grip, but filled with holes and slightly too small). Both gloves screwed up my hands in different ways: the gardeners gloves forced me to grip the handles like a madman, cutting off circulation, and the batter's gloves just cut off circulation all by themselves. We starting having to stop every hour so that I could take off my gloves and let some blood go through my fingers, and this was bad, because we were already going to be arriving quite late.

As the daylight started to fade, and as we went further north, and to higher and higher elevations, we were getting cold fast. The only bright spot was that, as Mono Lake swept into view, we were only a few miles away from Tioga Pass, quite literally the high point of our trip. It would get us into Yosemite and through the Sierra Nevadas, or I should say it would have, except that it was closed for the winter.



		We bravely tried taking pictures of ourselves waving maps in front of the "pass closed" sign, but it was to no avail. We were stuck on the wrong side of one of the same mountain range that had defeated the Donner party 100 years before.

The nearest alternate pass was an hour further north. Who knew if it was closed? At this point, about a dozen blond, bronzed, young sport bikers and their girlfriends pulled up with us, all wearing some sort of cold-weather all-body motorcycling gear, almost like a wetsuit. They paused briefly to consider the sign, and then went forward, ignoring it.

My friend Chris Gibson likes to read Aviation Safety magazine. He tells me that one thing that they've noticed is that small planes with two pilots in them (with one as the passenger) crash much more often than small planes with a single pilot, and the reason is this: where one pilot might be frightened of some oncoming weather and turn back, in a plane with two pilots, neither one wants to admit to the other that he isn't game to go ahead. In much the same spirit, John and I looked at each other, put our bikes in gear, and headed for the pass.

Twelve miles later we arrived at the actual closing. You could easily edge a motorcycle around the gate, and we proceeded with caution. Not a half a mile later I saw my first patch of ice on the road, and about a mile and a half after that, we hit a second, "no, really, we're closed!" gate. John and I looked at each other again, and because we were in our thirties rather than in our twenties, we turned back (with much mutual relief) and headed back out the way we'd come.

In the end, we gave up and checked into a motel for the night, sharing a room to save costs. We were filled with joy as we settled into the inn's warm, pleasant restaurant, and I personally had several glasses of their house wine with my dinner.

We each spent a night of misery, for different reasons. This was just a few months before I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea, a sleep disorder that causes you to choke loudly during the night. Here's how bad it is: it bothered my wife, and she's actually deaf. Imagine the effect on John, who, as it turned out, was one of these light sleepers, practically an insomniac.

Meanwhile, I was having serious hand trouble. Earlier in the day, I had settled down upon wearing a batter's glove on one hand (for traction) and a gardener's glove on the other hand (for not getting my circulation cut off as much), and the batter's glove hand was now just a throbbing mass of pain. I had totally screwed it up - it took about six months for the numbness to completely go away - and that night was amazingly bad.

I got up at 5:00am so that John could finally get some sleep, and we tottered out of there a little unsteadily at 8:30am or so. Having consulted the locals and a map, we headed for Sonora Pass (elevation 9,628 feet), which featured snow-covered countryside, but dry roadbeds.

John very graciously offered me his gloves for the remaining portion of the ride. It was unbelievably cold, although we passed some Rambo types (Marines? Survivalists?) shouting and running through obstacle courses at some sort of camp about 3 miles below the summit. Their attire mainly featured guns and headbands, rather than, for example, shirts.

"We made it!" The sign reads:

HISTORICAL LANDMARK, SONORA PASS, ELEVATION 9628

The possibility of a wagon road through this pass connecting Tuolumne County with the mining towns of Mono County was first called to public attention by Andrew J. Fletcher in 1862.

The original trail through Sonora Pass was opened for pack animals in September 1862. The trail passed over this divide, departed from the route of the present highway one mile west, climbed Northwesterly through Saint Mary's Pass, Elevation 10,040, then dropped down the canyon of the Clark Fork of the Stanislaus River.

The wagon road, which established the general location of the present highway, was completed through this pass in 1865.

Tuolumne County Historical Society, Stanislaus National Forest.

Filled with glory from our success, we resolutely took more photos of ourselves, now Triumphant (myself especially, on the Tiger).

The trip through the pass was stunningly beautiful, and almost made up for all the hell of the previous day and night. It would definitely be a trip I'd like to do again, only this time it would be immediately after the pass opens, and with cycling gloves.



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In the Owens River Valley with my beloved 1971 Triumph Tiger.		John Blackburn with his Kawasaki.



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