Getting Out of the Smoke — A Summer 2021 Ride Down 395 to Walker
Summer 2021 in Northern Nevada was something else. Wildfire smoke filled the valleys for weeks on end — thick, hazy, orange-tinged air that turned the mountains into silhouettes and made you feel like you were living inside a photograph with the saturation turned all the way down. It was hot, it was smoky, and it was relentless.
So we did what riders do. We got out.
The Smoke Season of 2021
If you lived in the Carson Valley or the Eastern Sierra that summer, you know exactly what it was like. Fires burning across California, Oregon, and Nevada simultaneously pushed smoke into every valley and basin in the region. The Carson Valley, Washoe Valley, and the high desert around Virginia City were all socked in for stretches that felt like they'd never end. Air quality alerts, hazy sunsets, and that persistent smell of smoke that gets into everything.
For riders, it meant a lot of days where you wanted to go but the air quality made you think twice. When a window opened up — or when you just decided you needed to move regardless — you took it.
Down 395 to Walker, California
A group of new friends and I pointed south on US Highway 395 and ran it straight down to Walker, California — a small community in the upper Walker River canyon, just across the Nevada state line. If you've ridden 395 through the Eastern Sierra, you know it's one of the great American highway corridors. The road runs along the base of the Sierra Nevada with the Great Basin stretching out to the east, and the scenery shifts constantly as you move south through Topaz, past the state line, and into the canyon country around Walker.
The air was cleaner down there. Trees overhead, the river nearby, and enough elevation and geography to push the smoke back. It felt like breathing again.
Walker Burger
We stopped at Walker Burger — a classic roadside spot that's been feeding riders and travelers on 395 for years. Great burger, good company, and the bonus of running into some old friends there. That's one of the things about riding 395 in the summer — you're never the only one who had the idea, and the people you run into along the way are usually worth meeting. We had a very nice time out of the smoke and under the trees. Exactly what the day needed.
Over Monitor Pass and Into Markleeville
On the way back we came over Monitor Pass — the climb on Highway 89 between Topaz and Markleeville that I'd ridden for the first time just a few weeks earlier. It's a great road in any conditions, but coming over it that day had an added weight to it. Dropping down into Markleeville, California, we could see the fire devastation from the Tamarack Fire up close.
The Tamarack Fire burned over 68,000 acres in Alpine County in the summer of 2021, one of the most destructive fires in that region's history. The destruction around the area was simply incredible to witness — scorched hillsides, burned timber, the kind of landscape that takes decades to recover. And yet Markleeville itself — that tiny, historic little town at the confluence of the Carson River tributaries — was still standing. The firefighters who made that happen deserve every bit of recognition they get. It was a remarkable effort to save a remarkable place.
Getting Out Is Always Worth It
Summer 2021 was a weird, smoky, difficult season for a lot of people in the West. But days like this one — new friends, a great road, a good burger, old friends showing up unexpectedly, and a sobering look at what fire can do to a landscape — reminded me why riding matters. You see things from a motorcycle that you'd never see from a car. You feel the air change as you drop into a canyon or climb a pass. You're present in a way that's hard to replicate anywhere else.
Even in a smoke-filled summer, the road finds a way to give you something worth remembering.