At 2,663 metres, Ebbetts Pass is the high point of Highway 4 and one of the quieter crossings of the Sierra Nevada. There is no lodge, no café and no souvenir stand, just a sign, a small parking area and the Pacific Crest Trail crossing the road, with thru-hikers sometimes resting in the shade on their long walk from Mexico to Canada. Ask one how far they have come and you will feel very lazy on your motorcycle.
The pass takes its name from John Ebbetts, who explored the route in the 1850s while looking for a crossing for a railroad. The railroad never came, which is why the road up here still feels like an afterthought. An older story holds that the trapper Jedediah Smith crossed the Sierra hereabouts in 1827, which would make it one of the first crossings by an American, although historians argue about the exact route.
The landscape is volcanic as well as granitic. Dark lava caps and reddish cliffs lie over the pale granite, and the slopes are scattered with whitebark pine and red fir. Just to the west the small Kinney Reservoir and Kinney Lakes sit in a shallow basin, and in late summer the meadows turn gold. When the air is clean, ridge after ridge rolls east toward Nevada.
The riding on either side is narrow and twisty, with no centre line for long stretches and gradients steep enough to make you think about your brakes. Going east, the descent toward the Carson River is a long series of tight bends through forest, with occasional views into deep valleys. Going west, the road climbs again over Pacific Grade Summit before dropping to Lake Alpine. Either way, you will want to keep your eyes up, because cyclists use this road too, and every July it is part of a famous long-distance cycling event over the passes of Alpine County.
There is nothing at the pass but the view. The road is closed in winter, typically from November into late spring, and afternoon thunderstorms are common in July and August, often with lightning and hail. Fuel is available in Arnold to the west and in the Carson Valley to the east, around Gardnerville and its neighbours, roughly forty kilometres away. Bring a jacket, because it is cold up here even when the valleys bake.