TRAVELING THE BACK ROADS OF MY MEMORY

 When I went to Lassen College in Susanville, California from 1968 to 1970, I spent many weekends driving the back roads of the surrounding area in my old 1963 Ford pickup.   There is the Lassen National Forest to the north of Susanville, where the terrain is so flat in places that you could get lost without a map.   Most of the forest roads were single-lane dirt roads going through sagebrush meadows, pine, and juniper forests.   Road signs were far and few between or just downright missing.   At some road junctions, you were at the mercy of just guessing which way was the right way.  You could drive all day and never see another vehicle.  If you had a breakdown or ran out of gas it was a long walk back to town, if you could find your way out of the maze of roads to a highway leading back to civilization.   Some roads made their way to Eagle Lake with summer homes and a paved road going back toward town.   

To the west is the Plumas National Forest with Diamond Peak overlooking Susanville.    There was a dirt road that went from Diamond Peak through the mixed conifer forest and came out at Mountain Meadow Reservoir east of Westwood, an old mill town with company housing that was owned by the Red River Lumber Company.   Now a scenic tourist community.  

To the south and east of Susanville, there is the Honey Lake Basin, with surrounding farms, high desserts, and isolated mountain ranges all the way into Nevada.   Honey Lake is where all the water from snowmelt on the eastside of the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains drains into with no outlet to the ocean, actually part of the Great Basin that makeup Nevada and western Utah.   When Honey Lake is completely full it is only 3 to 6 feet deep.   The Sierra Army Depot is east and south of Honey Lake with all kinds of underground bunkers and off-limits to public traffic.

One of the most adventurous drives was east of Susanville through high dessert, the Smoke Creek Mountains, remote cattle ranches, and ending up in the old railroad town of Gerlach, Nevada.   The only people I remember seeing on that trip were some cowhands while passing through a ranch.  For all I know I could have been on a private road as they all looked at me as if I was lost.