The Lost Sierra: Northern California Motorcycle Ride

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the October 2004 issue.

The phone rings. It’s Werner Wachter calling from Austria. “You vill come to Sacramento this weekend to my Edelweiss presentation at A&S BMW?”

It’s a question, but it sounds more like an order. I once asked Wachter, “What’s the difference between a German and an Austrian?” His response was subtle. He didn’t speak to me for months.

Anyway, of course we will come to Sacramento this weekend. It’s the end of March. We are enjoying a temporary respite in the usually Stalingrad-like winter here in greater Bieber in Big Valley on the high plains of northeast California. My Gold Wing’s battery is beginning to need me. And it has been way too long since I’ve seen the man who proposed to my wife more than 20 years ago on a rocky mountaintop in the Negev Desert. God, had only she accepted, what I would have saved…

The concept here is to ride 300 miles to Sacramento the fast way, west on State Route 299 over a couple of mountain passes and through one riverine canyon to Redding, then south on Interstate 5 down the long green riparian corridor of the Sacramento Valley. Then, after Wachter schnozzles up the riders at A&S BMW (located in the Sacramento burb of Roseville, the biggest Beemer dealer in the United States) on the many benefits of riding the Alps with Edelweiss, I shall lead him on an interesting route back to Big Valley for a short course in alfalfa farming and the putative wisdom of moving about as far from Los Angeles as one can get.

It goes well. Wachter’s slide show is a stunning revelation of the truth and beauty of a moto tour of alpine Europe. It made me remember drinking grappa in the moon shadows of the Jungfrau. 

Through the good offices of A&S BMW, Wachter secures the loan of a black and white BMW R 1150 RT-P Police Special. It is equipped with those lights and that siren, and on two occasions during the ride home, Wachter plays cop behind me and scares off a couple of the few years remaining to me and my loyal friend and passenger, Pam. The route home that I select, at least two thirds of which I’ve never ridden before, is a chancy high road in late March involving 6,700-foot Yuba Pass in the northern Sierra Nevada: Interstate 80 east to Auburn, then State Route 49 northeast to Calpine, then SR-89 northwest to SR-299, then eastward on the short final hop to the valley we love.

Rolling north on SR-49 in the waning afternoon, it doesn’t take long to escape the densely populated suburbs and traffic that surround the state capital of Sacramento. However, within an hour, we are for all practical purposes alone at last, riding rapturously in a deep canyon along the north fork of the Yuba River, the road every bit as sinuous and captivating as the river itself. This northern section of the Sierra Nevada is known as “The Lost Sierra” for good reason. Regional population peaked at 7,340 in 1860 when the gold rush was in full swing and then began to wane as the mines played out. The contemporary head count is 3,584. Locals think this lovely trend is due to the rugged vertical terrain that seems to defy contemporary development, and we are not here to argue. At a pit stop, with the light failing and the temperature plummeting, Wachter queries me again. “Where have you made reservations for the night?”

See all of Rider‘s California tour stories here.

Reservations? We don’t need no stinking reservations. We round a bend of the road and there in all its charming magnetism, tucked away in an alpine gorge at the confluence of the Yuba River and the Downie River, are the twinkling lights of the fetching historic burg of Downieville. We ride across a bridge and pull into a place that looks like a bucolic illustration on a postcard, The Downieville River Inn and Resort, where the rooms are located 50 feet or so from the sonorous riffles of the river. We are greeted by manager Jamie Alichwer who says, “Glad you’re here, of course we can put you up for the night.” Ah, the no-plan method of motorcycle touring, it has always borne for me the sweetest fruit.

Downieville highlights: The best calamari steaks we’ve ever had at The Grubstake. After dinner I whip Wachter three games of eight-ball in a row at the favored local saloon, the St. Charles. In the morning, during breakfast at the Downieville Diner, I ask a sheriff’s deputy seated at an adjacent table if they’ve recently used the historic gallows still fitted with a noose that remains standing near the county courthouse located just behind the inn. He looks up at me from his plate of eggs and says with a friendly smile, “Not yet.”

“Bikers Beware: Dead Man’s Curves Next 15 Miles.” This sign nailed to a pine tree along SR-49 near Sierra City just as the road begins to wind tightly up to the top of Yuba Pass only amplifies the warning we heard in Downieville. Watch the snowmelt, the blind curves, the rocks. Many riders have gone rubber side-up here. Since Wachter and I have both known the pain of that experience, we proceed with more caution than usual, and the reward at the top of the pass is a stunning eagle’s view of the sprawling green floor of the biggest alpine valley in North America, Sierra Valley, where working ranches date back to the 1800s and, like so much else here, seem little changed from quieter days.

Give a look at the map at SR-89 as it plunges north from Calpine to Lake Almanor through the heart of Plumas County in Feather River country and then farther north as it continues through Lassen National Forest. Notice the distinct dearth of dots and lines and wonder no longer why this vast region of northeast California is often referred to by the relative few who live here as the California no one knows. The wonder of it is not lost on Wachter. He keeps referring to the possibility of a new Edelweiss U.S. tour. He wants to go swimming in Lake Almanor where the water is almost too cold for the trout this time of the year. He does go swimming in Lake Almanor. Pam and I watch him splashing and turning blue from the shore. She asks me, “Is he crazy?” “Of course he is,” I reply, but he’s one of the happiest guys I know, and there’s a lesson in him that isn’t lost on me either.

Lassen National Park may not be rideable yet, but the view of the immense volcanic mountain sheathed brilliantly white from an overlook above Old Station on our detour route on SR-44 is another sight that shocks up understanding that a woman is the true ruler of this planet, Ma Nature herself. There are people still living here who remember her wrath when Mount Lassen spewed roaring rivers of molten rock aglow with hellfire in 1915. That it is going to happen again one day is a foregone conclusion.

From this point, the final 60-mile leg to Bieber in Big Valley is all home ground to me. One more stop seems required, Burney Falls State Park, located on SR-89 just a few miles north of its junction with SR-299. A hundred million gallons a day gorge up from volcanic basalt to create Burney Creek, and then all that water falls off a 130-foot cliff into a misty gorge lined with huge old-growth fir and pine, every tree soaring up to heaven with enough board feet to frame a mansion. We take the short one-third-mile hike down to the base of the roaring falls and into the mist where the air is as clean and tart as freezing watercress.

We have a great time at home in Big Valley. I show Wachter the farm machinery, the wells, the irrigation lines, the golden sweep of the still dormant fields, the lonely beauty of the high plains. He understands why I moved here 10 years ago from SoCal. But he has promises to keep down there, at Keith Code’s California Superbike School at Willow Springs Raceway. He wants me to go with him, but I tell him I go to superbike school every night, in my dreams. 

As he’s re-packing his bike to leave a few mornings later, I warn him again about the lucky break we’ve had in the weather, and it’s changing fast as a light snow begins to blow in from the southwest. “Head west to the valley,” I tell him, “take the low road.” “No,” he says, “I want to go east on an interesting route.” “What about the weather, ice on the road?” He drills me with that look of the old empire in his eyes and says simply, “We are men.”

Wachter, I love you because you’re far crazier than I am and so I know, for me at least, there is hope.

See all of Rider‘s touring stories here.

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