January ride report for El Toro Joe

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Bugnatr

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Location
The Woods of Peardale, CA
We know Joe is in rehab from his back surgery and he heeds all the entertainment he can get, here's a RR from Sunday's ride. We are having mild weather conditions so after some mid week planing with my local riding buds we were a go.. Temps were between mid 40's launch to upper 50's, brisk but dry.

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These ride always includes some cat hearding but Eric on his Bonniville, Tom with the Beemer and Golden Boy Brian with his new to him V Strom were not too much trouble to keep moving. The Katoom hasn't seen much winter duty so it was nice to get back on the 990 and some air time for the front tire. Damn.... that 990 is fun.

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Eric had a real nice Tuono but down sized to this 02 Bonnie special. I have ridden it and it does quite well if you keep moving, 4th gear is your friend.

Plan ride to Oroville, eat breakfast and ride Chroekee Rd to Hwy 70 and the up the Feather River Canyon to Belden Town. Our route https://goo.gl/maps/J7lQA

Chroekee Rd is a tight undulating twisty paved road that begs for second and even first gear to handle the quick changes in road direction up and down in the hills. Bitchin'!!!

Eric mentioned we actually stop at the town site of Cherokee and learn some history. Turns out Cherokee was a huge hydraulic mining operation that also was the first Diamond Mine in the US. At one time the town had over 1000 people, 8 hotels and 17 BARS! The wild west gold style.

Good read here Joe, you have the time https://www.newsreview.com/chico/ghosts-of-cherokee/content?oid=10675111

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The local plaque had tons of information but too small to capture however check out all the different types of rock used in the display setting. Even some petrified rock is included.

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The old Assay office where you can still see the vault for the gold storage. Amazing it's still there after 135 years, buildings don't last as long out west with wood rot and earthquakes to break up the old foundations so it's cool to see this one still there-sort of.

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GB walks past a giant water monitor used to wash down the mountain sides many years ago. Those miners were engineering marvels and an environmental disaster.

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Another stop, yielding a fine example of a hard rock (underground mine) stamp mill for crushing rock and using mercury to extract the gold. These boys were real hard on the planet too.

After our history lesson in Cherokee we motored up to Hwy 70 and turned right up the Feather River Canyon. For those not familiar the FR canyon is an awesome road, along with the Southern Pacific Railroad that share the canyon with the Feather River but that can be a rr another time. Hwy 70 was designed for speeds of 65 in many places so with very light winter traffic let's just say we had some fun.

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Here is my attempt at motorcycle art during a rest stop along the river.

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We finally made it to Belden Town where temps were dropping in the 40's and sand was ever present on the road from previous snow falls. Good place to turn around. Note the Martini glass on top of the sign, it's a happy Belden town!

It was time to retrace our tracks toward home. Today was only 215 miles but considering the generous use of twisty back roads plus stops to kick tires and tell lies it was a mighty fine day to ride.

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I did tell my comrades about your surgery Joe and we wish you a speedy and full recovery which finds you riding by the time the Apple trees bloom.

Doug

 
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That looks like a great place to explore on the bike. Thanks for sharing.

P.S. - Joe, heal up well - the iron horse waits with patience, but not much!

 
Most-Excellent Doug! Thank you for the history lesson as well. That Stamp Mill (to me) was the centerpiece. I love how creative they were back then and with what they had to work with? holyschmolly.

I'm sure Cigar-Joe will eat this up!
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Thanks Bug!

 
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Great RR and pics Doug, I did check your spot link, a couple times yesterday. Looked like you guys had a great day. Sitting here at the kitchen table watching the snow come down and being able to read your RR, makes all of this a lot easier to deal with. Thanks

 
WRT: Using Mercury etc.. and being hard on the planet.

No secret, I live in the center of the largest hard rock nickle mining town in this hemisphere. The miners here are hardcore. Blasting and tunneling down over 8000 feet through solid pre-cambrian granite. Back in the day, the only technology they had to extract the nickel, gold, copper and platinum from the rock was by leaching it out in huge open pit arsenic pools. Ya know how every area begs you to buy food grown locally? Ya, we don't do that. The soil is full of heavy metals and is the reason Sudbury has one of the highest cancer levels in North America. It's also the reason NASA sent the Apollo 9 mission astronauts here to train. It's no joke when people here say the landscape looked like the surface of the moon!

That was 35 years ago. With re-greening efforts, you wouldn't recognize the place if the last you saw of it was back then. But it's like a fascia on an old house, go back off the hwy a little bit and theirs that old black stained granite rock. Back in the 70's they built the super stack, which was the tallest smoke stack on the planet for a long time, now theirs bigger ones. It put the smoke from the refining high up in to the jetstream (and to the south). That did a lot to return things back to normal, at least here. Funny, their talking about knocking the stack down now. I guess it's getting to costly to maintain.

Anyway, these old mining town show the way from our past, and provide a warning to the future.

 
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