- [Male Narrator] Support for Wild Nevada Memories is provided by the William N. Pennington foundation - [Female Narrator] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed - [Male Narrator] Gail and John Sande - [Female Narrator] Margaret and Charles Burback.

- [Male Narrator] And by individual members - [Dave] It's been 20 years since Wild Nevada first appeared on public television.

Over the years many people have asked what's it like to travel around and make the show.

So let's celebrate the 20th anniversary by reliving one of our favorite adventures and sharing some wild Nevada memories.

Hi, welcome to Wild Nevada I'm Dave Santina - and I'm Chris Orr.

- So we've took forever to shoot that little introduction because there are guys shooting guns at targets less than a hundred yards away from us.

And you can just ping, ping, ping, pop, pop.

We had to wait in between the bangs to squeeze in our little thirty second introduction.

- [Dave] This is the hungry valley recreation area.

More popularly known as moon rocks.

It's located about 25 miles north of the Reno sparks area off of highway 445 and Winnemucca ranch road.

It's a lunar landscape that is by itself an attraction worthy of a visit.

- It's amazing how many times we would see a lizard and immediately stopped shooting what we were in the process of shooting just to get shots of the lizard as it was scaring over the rock.

- I had been to moon rocks many times and I think most of the time when I've gone to moon rocks it is actually with my brother and or my nephew.

So it was really fitting that my nephew met us out there and that we did the segment with him and some of his friends, John and his buddies Matt and pat had been riding together for years and they know how to have some fun out here at moon rocks.

- Moon rocks is actually designated as a recreational vehicle area, and anybody can come out here with their vehicles recommended four wheel drive, you know, and then you can go all the way up into these rocks.

There's tons of trails everywhere.

You can bring your bikes, your UTVs, your vehicles bring your campers, come out and camp.

This is a designated area for that.

- So what did you guys bring out today?

- So we have a Yamaha, 1000 UTV today.

We raced this particular UTV in the Vegas To Reno - Coming down one of those corners, I was sitting passenger holding the camera, trying to get some footage.

And I remember hitting a bump and the camera got me right in the jaw and I had a sore jaw for a couple of days - [John] Race around 500 miles and see who gets there first in your class so we race against a bunch of UTVs.

- Can you just get any UTV and race it?

- No, you can't.

You have to add a lot of safety gear to these vehicles and do some upgrades with the suspension.

And we did a lot of that.

- A lot of work, not many things left stock on there.

As you can see, it's got bigger tires, bigger wheels bigger shocks, safer harnesses, safer seats, safer roll cage.

- [Chris] So this is not the typical vehicle that someone's just going to bring out and play with on a weekend.

- [John] Not usually - [Matt] Probably not no - So obviously Chris set this up by having her nephew be the guy we were going to talk to, and they had all the equipment they had the connections, they helped us connect with the other guests who we met this day - [John] Yeah, we'll take you for a ride.

Let's get our gear.

- We had to figure out how to mount cameras inside these vehicles.

As they're speeding down these dirt paths - [Chris] You see those tubes on the sides of our helmets.

They pump air in, so the pressure keeps out dust.

John takes us out onto some of the many miles of road and trail in the moon rocks area.

At first, he picks an area with lots of woops to test me a bit with its roller coaster like ups and downs.

- You know it's funny, we use these cameras that cost several thousand dollars to film most of these Wild Nevada episodes, but in this segment, these little Go Pros just saved us - They've become a standard for any kind of adventure action programming because you get this, you get great shots like this - We can talk to each other through those helmets.

And he kept checking on me cause he was afraid I was going to get carsick.

He kept saying "Are you okay?"

"Are you okay?"

And I just kept giggling and I kept giggling.

So he would go ahead and go faster, faster.

- That looks so fun, how was it?

- Oh my God that was so much fun.

It was a blast.

Those little hoopty things.

Oh my gosh, they were fun.

- I'm going to give you back your sunglasses.

- [Dave] Now here's someone who builds custom desert racers and other off-road vehicles.

Sam Cothrun runs Samco fabrication.

- Well, you get a little bit of everything.

The rock crawlers have all these rocks.

A lot of, a lot of technical terrain for the rock crawlers and the sandy soil gives you a good terrain to ride motorcycles.

And then it creates a whoops and the whoops are great to test stuff like this truck.

- So after filming these guys, speeding down those, those dirt washes.

I had a mouthful dirt at the end of the day.

It just, from every time they would zoom by me and I would keep forgetting to keep my mouth closed.

And it was, I would pay the price every time they went by and Moon Rocks dirt doesn't taste very good - [Sam] Evolved over this period of time to handle really rough terrain and to go over it at a high rate of speed.

And that's what I really enjoy the vehicles ability and the technical ability within the craftsmanship that you see in a lot of these different vehicles that we see today.

It's, it's pretty awesome.

- Sam was really patient with us.

And so was Randy who comes next because they had to wait for us to do the first segment with John and the other guys and shoot all of that and the ride.

And then they, then Sam had his turn and this was a hot day.

This was really uncomfortably hot, but everybody was really patient and pleasant and they could have been unhappy.

They had they would have reason to, to complain, but no one did - This truck cost-wise is probably similar to going and buying a new pickup truck down at the dealership.

This is something that blue collar hardworking people can get them and their friends together and they can work hard and they can go out there and race a class like 1450, just like anybody else.

Today we're actually out here we're testing and tuning this truck.

We're tuning the shock absorbers and vehicle tuning is a really important part of developing an off-road car.

- So right here, we got a fuel pump, ignition - [Dave] Sam invites me to ride in the truck while he take's a test run I'm excited to get a taste - Oh, He beat the hell out of me in this truck.

I got bounced around so hard.

- [Dave] Then we hit the woops - See my hand like that.

I'm trying to hold my phone, trying to record, you know, and it's useless.

- Yeah, there's another mouth full of dirt.

- [Dave] This is unreal, for a minute I was tense, but then I let go and treated the ride like they do an airline flight where I trust the pilot because I don't know how to fly.

And I sure don't know how to drive like this.

- [Chris] For those who want to get vertical.

When off-roading Randy Slawson is your man.

He's one of the best rock crawlers in the world.

Randy's a fabricator too.

And he brought one of his creations out to Moon Rocks.

- Randy waited the longest, hours and hours.

I felt really guilty about how long he had to wait.

In fact, you can see his face.

He's pretty red.

He wasn't that red.

When we got there in the morning, he just spent the day outside.

- This is a Ultra four, which is a form of racing that we're doing.

That's a mix of desert and rock crawling.

We can crawl all over these boulders and get down on these go fast roads and go a hundred miles an hour.

All in the same vehicle.

We've been developing these cars over the last 10 years or so.

It's a mix of you know, suspension, design, geometry, tuning, horsepower all the different things that we do with the cars to make them handle going fast and creepy crawling through all this stuff.

- [Dave] Why is this area a good one for rock crawling other than the fact that of course there are rocks everywhere but what about this area makes that actually accessible?

- Well, it's close to town.

The areas, you know, designated OHV, there's lots of trails and good mix of go fast, sand washes and dirt roads as well as the rocks out here.

So it's a pretty good spot for us to come out and test and tune and play with our machines.

But I think it's real popular because it's so accessible.

A huge portion of this state is BLM land and anything that's BLM is open for off-road travel.

So that's the big draw for me.

Off-road travel is one of the main reasons that I moved to Nevada.

The important thing is just to stick to the trails that are already burned in.

There's so many of them, it's not like you need to cut your own track.

- [Dave] Randy's word carries a lot of weight.

He's a superstar driver and a two time winner of the ultimate off-road race the King of the Hammers.

- [Randy] The whole premise is it's a mix of desert racing and rock crawling and it's an endurance race.

You go out and run trails know up through these nasty craggy canyons in Johnson valley in Southern California.

They're world renowned as being very difficult canyons rock trails.

So the original one I think was 50 miles.

And now we've done one that was 220 miles.

I won that one in 2015.

And it was like a seven and a half, eight hour day.

You know, you're in the car, you'd drive as fast as you can through all these trails and then come out and your pit crews waiting for you and you splash them gas and change the tire or whatever you need to do.

And then back out of the desert and just continuous driving as fast as you can go.

- [Dave] That's pretty cool.

- [Chris] Have you ever raced against anything that you built when you weren't driving it?

- Sure.

- Did you beat your own vehicles?

- Well, naturally - You're going to demo it for us.

- Sure, strap in - When we started this ride, one of the things Randy said to me was to make sure to keep my arms and my hands inside the roll cage.

Once he told me that, I found myself very much doing this.

- [Chris] It's disconcerting but completely thrilling to be traveling up a rock base at this amazing angle.

- So I had to scramble up these moon rocks to get some of these camera shots and that was a little scary.

There were a couple of times where I didn't know which rock they're going to come flying over.

And luckily I guessed it right, stayed out of the way - [Chris] The crawler conquers the rocks and Randy shows me what else it can do.

As we head out into the open.

It can fly.

- we finished the rock climb, and he just takes off and the camera is left behind kind of like where did they go?

And we just flew across the desert.

I think he had been waiting to be able to get up and run his vehicle and so at that point he just wanted to run and we flew across that desert on that road going so fast.

It was, it was pretty amazing how fast that thing went.

- [Chris] Here we meet Jack Hursh of the University of Nevada School of Mines and Geology who had a hand in naming McLane peak after Alvin - This show happened because of Jack Hursh.

He was the guy who came to us and said did you know that there was a peak named after Alvin McLane?

It seems like it'd be a great Wild Nevada segment.

And we said, of course it would, so let's go do it.

And Jack being as enthusiastic as he was seemed like a natural guy to take us on the trip he'd been there before.

So of course, Jack should take us.

- [Dave] We start down a graded dirt road that our GPS tells us is called and this is real Wild Ass road.

Soon we realized where that name came from.

- It was pretty funny, we are out there yelling at the wild asses to get them to look at us so we can get a couple of camera shots of them.

And I kind of felt like an idiot, but it worked - [Chris] A slow drive down a long wash, eventually leads us to within sight of the cave - [Chris] Oh and we're at the cave - [Jack] All right so as we're hiking up to the rock shelters - The BLM after this show was broadcast reached out and said, Hey I really don't think you should be showing people how to get to these caves.

They're archeological sites.

They were not too happy with me.

I think we did a good enough job of disguising how to get there though.

You've really got to want to find it, to make the effort because that's a hard drive, much harder than what we saw - Are these shoreline tufas and these tufas clinging to the rocks above the entrance to the rock shelter.

- [Chris] Yeah, it's amazing.

When you come into the desert and you hear terms like shoreline, you know, you don't think about how different the landscape was that many years ago.

- So when, if you look across too, you can see the shorelines.

And if you go up further on the mountains you can see the shoreline levels that are at the same level that we are at right now.

So see how deep the lake was.

- [Dave] It's mind blowing to think about that much water being here - That was ancient lake Lahontan.

So 13,000 years ago, this was a huge deep lake that covered most of Northwestern, Nevada.

These rock shelters were inhabited by what is called the Lovelock culture.

So we're talking about 1000 to 4,000 years ago.

So there was a lot of hunting, bird life, fish and a lot of seeds and roots that they could gather.

And they inhabited these rock shelters and caves out open over a shallow lake that was rich in resources of food.

- [Jack] Let's go have a look.

- And here we have a really good view inside here of the shoreline.

Tufa - This was a hard part for being in filming, because we had just scrambled up this hill and I was huffing and puffing and we got into that cave and it smelled like the bat guano and the bats were doing their thing in that cave.

And it did not smell good.

And that was really hard after just racing up the hill with the camera and just taking all that air.

And that was that was rough.

This was a rough one.

- Wow.

Do you feel how cool it feels in here?

- [Dave] Oh yeah.

- On a hot day sometimes getting to visit some of those cave structures are a nice treat because they're nice and cool.

- [Dave] So this was you think where people spent most of their time when they lived here?

- [Jack] I think so.

And particularly winter time, the harsh times of the year they would have taken shelter here.

And I think they could have packed in quite a few people with all these ledges and different maybe family units camping around.

- [Dave] I could imagine, I can imagine different locations you know.

- [Jack] And then areas for storing food and.

- [Chris] You really feel protected in here.

- [Jack] while it'd be a real constant temperature warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

Just like we're feeling the coolness because it's pretty warm day outside but it'd be fairly constant in here.

The food would not spoil so they would can take advantage of that.

They could leave and they could go hunting in other areas and then come back and the food would still be in good condition.

And anything else that they brought along well which is amazing.

A lot of the artifacts, the basketry, that's just it's an organic artifact made from Tule reeds lasted thousands of years preserved in this environment preserved beautifully.

- So what makes something an artifact?

- Well, an artifact is, is the remnant of a, of a human a human made object that is, has cultural ties left behind by previous people look at this ladder here.

Well, that's an artifact in itself in that the archeological surveys in the 1960s built that ladder to go up to that ledge.

- I want it to climb that ladder so bad to get some shots down, but it was, it was not advised.

- And I'll show you as we're leaving the beautiful view of McLane, Peak.

- Oh, Excellent.

- Sounds good.

All right, check this out.

This is what I want them to show you, this view.

That's McLane peak, right there.

- Oh cool.

I can't wait to get there.

- That's where we're going next.

Let's go.

- [Chris] After you.

- [Chris] Wildlife just keeps coming out for us today.

Jack sees a rattlesnake and of course our crew jumps out to see it, but we all keep our distance.

- So that's me with my camera phone getting shots of them with their camera phones and other cameras getting shots of this rattlesnake.

It was very meta.

- It's always a shock when you see a rattlesnake and I'm always just glad when we encounter them.

And we're far enough away that we can just get them on video and not step on them.

- [Jack] All right, we're going to take this trail.

We're going to go up over this summit and then we'll have a nice view of the backside of McLane peak.

- [Chris] This hike is a special one for us.

We met Alvin McLane on the very first day we ever worked on Wild Nevada and Alvin took us on a hike.

- What's really great right now you see the rose hips They're just perfect for making tea right now.

- Alvin truly was the third host of Wild Nevada and So many of our trips were based on ideas that he suggested or trails that he suggested even when he wasn't on the show with us.

- I didn't know, Alvin personally beyond the show just seemed so happy that that's all I think of when I think of Alvin.

I'm sure he's a human being.

I'm sure he had hard, hard moments and bad days and was in a bad mood once in a while, but I never saw it.

So to me, Alvin is always this smiling happy guy, he was just a joy to be around.

- [Chris] How did you meet Alvin?

How did you know him?

- [Jack] Well, working at the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and I already knew who he was.

And so I'd have conversations with him.

And I was fascinated.

I always have been about the Winnemucca Lake area.

It's always just been awesome to me.

And so Alvin and I many times would just stand in the hall and have conversations.

And the most memorable conversations I had with them were about, Winnemucca Lake - We're doing shots like this where they would walk by the camera.

That's the only way to be able to do that.

Not be seen as to crouch behind a bush or lay down on the ground and make yourself as low as possible considerations.

Just like this shot.

Like here's someone, one of us was laying down, hiding in the bushes, trying to stay out of the other guy's shot.

And that's how we filmed this entire sequence.

- Jack sold us on this location by showing us a photo.

He took a few years before when he had visited but he hadn't made it to the peak because he got vertigo.

He said he couldn't move any further than the spot where he took the picture.

- One of my favorite memories of Alvin I'm thinking about going out and exploring with him.

And I like to think of myself as a fairly active person but I just had such a hard time keeping up with him.

If I could keep up with a man that was what, 40 years my senior, I was so proud of myself.

- [Chris] Oh my gosh.

Look at that view.

- So that's where Jack took the photo.

And then to get there it's straight down and then straight up, it's quite challenging.

- We really didn't know what we were getting ourselves in for.

And it was, it was a scramble.

It was a real climb and a scramble for all of us to get up there.

- [Chris] The last climb to the peak is the most challenging with three and four point scrambling required almost the entire way.

- And I remember getting to the top of this peak with my camera in hand and I was leaning over to get shots and I got vertigo.

Yeah.

I learned my lesson.

I learned to stay put and you know just hold the camera over the edge without trying to peek over yourself.

- [Chris] Takes your breath away.

It's gorgeous.

Alvin would be proud - when I got to the top of that peak and saw the registry.

I thought it'd be really neat to write a little note to my son Skyler in it.

So I wrote scatter a little note and dated it with maybe the hopes that some years down the road when he hikes that peak by himself he can open it up and see the note that I left for him.

I think it would be a pretty special moment and I hope it happens.

- [Jack] And he's probably the most esteemed knowledgeable Nevadan that we knew.

And his knowledge came about.

It was, it was boots on the ground and he was out there.

He knew every, he knew every place in Nevada.

He knew he knew its intimate details and he was very modest and could share it with you.

And it inspired you to get out there and enjoy it as well.

- You know, anytime I've had a conversation about Alvin I don't know that I've ever heard anyone ever say a negative thing about him, but I don't know that I would ever want to hear it.

I think he was one of those special people that touched a lot of, not only the people in this area that he loved, but a lot of this area in general and so I'll just say we miss you Alvin.

- A canyon where he took us, and while we are walking out this is off camera now we're just done.

We've finished our hike and now we're just going back to the car and a little pebble goes, tick, tick, tick falls off a cliff, you know, and he goes, and he stopped.

He goes, whoa, a geologic event.

And I go, I remember thinking it was a pebble falling off a rock was off a cliff.

What's that?

And he says, I don't know that that's how it happens.

I, it just like a light bulb went off and I realized, yeah that pebble times, millions of times, over millions of years built that canyon and that mountain and you know these valleys and it just kinda opened my eyes.

Well we wanted to honor Alvin in our way from the Wild Nevada team.

So we made this little page that we're going to put up here.

It says, hello, you're on top of Alvin McLane peak.

And it's got story of Alvin and some photos that we took on old shows.

And this is a thumb drive that has four episodes that we did with Alvin in past years.

And we're going to keep it up here with the registry.

And if you come up here at Alvin McLane peak and find it please take it home and enjoy the shows, unwrap it from here.

And please leave the sheet.

Cause I'd love for anybody who comes up here to find a story of who Alvin was because we loved him and we really want to honor him.

And I want to say thanks to Jack for bringing us up here.

It's been a great time.

- You're welcome.

It's been a great day - Jack did a great job.

We were so lucky that he reached out with this idea.

Otherwise I never would have known there.

Was a McLane Peak at all.

There's no better place for us to end a trip.

- We've gotten to stir up a little dust with some desert racing yesterday.

- Yes we did I'm still feeling it, but I'm okay.

It was a good way.

This is a good way to shake off the bumps from yesterday.

It was tremendous.

And we had blast - [Dave] That's Steve, here's Jack that's Alex, I'm Dave we're at the top of McLane peak named for Alvin McLane who most of us knew and loved and Alex would have if he ever met him.

So don't you wish you were us.

I know I do.

- We were out so late this day took so long to climb back down, get to the vehicle and then drive out.

And then the vehicle got stuck.

One of our vehicles got stuck in the sand and of course I took a video of it rather than help.

- A little problem out in the desert.

We got stuck.

We finally got to use that shovel - [Male Narrator] Support for Wild Nevada Memories is provided by the William N. Pennington foundation - [Female Narrator] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed, - [Male Narrator] Gail and John Sande - [Female Narrator] Margaret and Charles Burback - [Male Narrator] and by individual members.