Day Fourteen, in words

Two weeks on the road, and the next day brought me:

• A shower and a shave never felt this good. Well, maybe not except for the last time this trip I’d spent four days without them…wow. I do sort of think our society has, in general, an “excessive cleanliness” thing going on at times, but even I don’t want to get this dirty before getting clean again. ;-)
• Talking to the hotel manager in St. George…a guy who’s of Indian background but who’s basically American; he and his wife are both in their early 30s and incredibly friendly. They moved here from Seattle. St. George is apparently one of the fastest-growing counties in the US — lots of people from California who are sick of the expense of housing there. Of course, it’s also 120 degrees in St. George in the summer, and it’s, you know, Utah. So I’m not sure it’s exactly where I want to move any time soon…
• Finishing the last little bits of my cantaloupe from Green River. So good.
• Zion National Park: I’ve been there before a number of times, and it really is one of the most amazing national parks I’ve ever been to before. Also, extremely crowded. Fortunately, it turns out the next exit north off of I-15 has a little back road into the park that almost nobody goes on; even at the height of summer, it was almost completely empty. It’s not quite the same as being in Zion itself, but it’s a pretty good approximation while spending vastly less time fighting crowds of people.
• Middle of Nowhere, UT: look at a map of Utah, and notice there are almost no north-south roads across the western third of the state. There’s a reason why…and it’s very cool to be out there, among absolutely nothing, seeing the little towns go by — and watching the thunderstorms, and dust storms, build up across the plains. They’re amazing — there are dust clouds that stretch out for miles and miles and miles, starting as a little blur on the horizon far off in front of you and ending up as a swirling, pummeling cloud of dust all around you. (One of the few reasons, other than rain, I put the top up during this entire trip.) Pretty impressive.
• Little tiny Utah farming or mining towns that have almost become ghost towns over time…see the Hotel Milford in the pictures for today from Milford, UT, or the “main street” to Deseret, UT. There’s even an 1860s-era adobe mud fort in Deseret (Fort Deseret) with its own built-in moat…OK, so it’s actually an irrigation canal for the local farm fields, but it’s pretty cool anyway. Turning and heading west across Utah to the Nevada border just made me feel like I was even more of the middle of nowhere.
• A creative stop sign someone erected at the “T” of a road that people go about 95 MPH on. Something tells me this was put there after some…incidents…had happened.
• You undoubtedly can’t tell, but those are seagulls out there in one of those pictures, right in the middle of a desert about a thousand miles from the nearest ocean and two hundred from the nearest sizable lake. As far as I can tell, they’ve used an aquifer to irrigate some of the surrounding fields, and they let the excess water collect here…and, somehow, seagulls found the place and have made it their home. Believe me, it is one of the more surreal experiences in life to see seagulls flying overhead a hundred miles into an absolutely parched desert.
• Great Basin National Park. This is one of the newest national parks, and the only one in the entire state of Nevada (save a tiny piece of Death Valley National Park). It’s beautiful, and the fact that it’s nearly deserted only makes it all the more so. It’s high up in the mountains, all tall pines, mountain streams, and sweeping vistas, and has an incredibly friendly staff of rangers and wonderful campgrounds. I pulled into a campground late-ish on Friday night at the height of the season and found fully a dozen unoccupied sites.
• Lying my head down inside my tent, nice and cool and comfortable for once, next to a stream burbling away and the sounds of deer moving through the underbrush a few hundred feet away. Just about perfect. I slept soundly…and long.

Day 14: (Friday, August 17, 2007) St. George, UT to Great Basin National Park, NV.
Miles: 5495.6 + 296.7 = 5792.3 total. Current distance from home: 590 miles.
Photos: 2,715 (34.2 GB) + 174 (2.28 GB) = 2,889 (36.5 GB) total.
Next up: the loneliest road in America…