We woke “early”, around 8am, hoping to get on the road at a decent time. After breakfast and last minute instructions on dog care, we said goodbye to Berta, Gary, Kipper, Hops, and Barley, and set out towards Utah by 10am. Taking I-80, the roads were clear and so were the skies, until we reached the Sierras. The road was still clear but just barely, a few feet of snow piled up against the roadside. It was kind of neat to see all that snow knowing that we would be in the dry desert heat in just a matter of hours; 70 degrees and sunny is forecasted for Escalante the entire time we’ll be there! Soon we were dropping into Reno and the furthest point I had been in Nevada (besides an overnighter in Las Vegas years ago). Mat had done a couple of trips in Nevada as a kid and tried to explain the beauty of it to me. I was excited to see what was beyond Reno.
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| Snow in the Sierras |
We switched over to hwy 50, stopping at a Walgreens for chapstick & Zanfel; apparently, there's lots of poison ivy in the canyons of Escalante. It wasn’t long after pulling onto hwy 50 that the amazing beauty began! We stopped at a little rest area near the Salt Wells which had a nice little loop trail to some petroglyphs. The stark landscape was amazing. Gazing at the hills nearby you could see the faint lines where prehistoric lake shores resided. Back in the car, we rounded the bed to take in Salt Wells in full view, so breathtaking! Snow dusted the numerous mountain ranges around, and dark silver-blue clouds dominated the sky so only slivers of sunlight in various sizes accented the land. And as we drove up and over that first pass and down into the next open, barren valley, it only got more beautiful. We continued on this way for the rest of the day: driving along desolate hwy 50 through a small mountain pass into the next valley 10 miles across and stretching hundreds of miles long.
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| Salt Wells |
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| Petroglyphs at Salt Wells |
We played with our GTI on that desolate highway. We stopped completely, timing our 0 to 60. We got the car up to 120 mph and could have gone faster if the road wasn’t so uneven. We braked checked, Mat even tried a J turn at a rest area. We would go a whole 30 minutes without seeing another car. And the emptiness was just something else completely. I’m used to big open spaces having spent a lot of time at my grandparents' ranch in Eastern Oregon. But this was different. These big open valleys had absolutely no ranches, no buildings, sometimes not even fences. Just sagebrush and an occasional dirt road taking off in a straight line perpendicular from the highway, leaving you wondering where the hell it went.
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| Nevada Beauty |
I couldn’t figure out why there was absolutely nothing in Nevada. I mean, sure it was in the middle of nowhere but so were a lot of other places that supported big cities or at least ranch land. It didn’t get any hotter or colder than other places in the US. I later found out the Great Basin of Nevada was a place where no water left, only collected in lakes to be reabsorbed by the sky or the earth, hence all the salt flats. It made sense to me that, although we have the technology to settle the area - sort of - our ancestors who establish most populated areas did not have the means to eek out a living in a great salt basin. Despite being hard to settle, Nevada does have a lot of history. Driving along hwy 50 is practically the same route taken by the Pony Express on it’s trek from Missouri to San Francisco.
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| Nevada Beauty |
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| Driving into the storm |
The weather was very dramatic but not bad. We did get some snow over Austin but it dissipated as soon as we dropped over the other side of the pass. We eventually ended up in Ely around 8pm, tired & hungry. We snatched a room at the Lucky 7’s Motel and headed over to the historic Hotel Nevada for dinner and a free margarita, courtesy of our hotel. We dropped $7 playing some slots before heading back to the hotel and passing out.
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| Clouds clinging to the mountains |
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