Only two more days, and I managed to find…
- Waking up in Great Basin National Park was just wonderful. Seriously, I’ve loved camping every place I ran into on the entire trip, but this absolutely takes the cake for best campground in general. Friendly folks, sites not too close together, chilly (but not too cold) mountain air as I woke up…wonderful.
- Mount Wheeler: I had no idea Nevada was as mountainous as it is. Mount Wheeler is the tallest peak in the national park, and it’s over 13,000 feet high. There’s a road that goes most of the way up to it (leaving quite a hike still, though — one that requires a lot more patience and time than I had at the moment) that’s a really beautiful drive, especially at 7:00 AM with nobody else on it. I saw deer bounding through the brush and got to stand on the edge of a mountain, cool morning air waving through my hair, and look out over the vast desert (and, yes, basin) lying off in the distance…
- Baker, NV: this town of about 200 is the biggest “city” around Great Basin for over a hundred miles. I stopped for breakfast at the closest thing they have to a restaurant, only to find that their cook had the day off and so all they had were some brownies and slices of pie. As much as I like pie and brownies, at 7:30 AM it’s a little much for me. I grabbed some coffee instead and took off…
- U.S. 50 across Nevada is called the “loneliest road in America”, and I can see why. About every two hours you come across a town with a grand total of about 150 people in it, along with a couple gas stations and maybe a motel or two. It was ten or fifteen minutes between seeing any cars at all (even going the other direction; at a net closing speed of about 140 MPH, this means it was 25-35 miles between cars out there). Amazing. The road was beautiful, if a little repetitive: flat plains stretching out between waves of mountains every thirty minutes or so. I really had no idea that Nevada looked like this in the least; in my mind, it was always one infinite, hot, dusty, low desert. Maybe I just drove by Vegas one too many times. It’s actually very pretty, in a very lonely kind of way…
- Coming across the “Most Beautiful Phone Booth on Earth”, right next to Sand Mountain, in western Nevada. You find the strangest things in the desert, I tell you. It’s decorated with stickers all over, but only takes credit cards for calls — and God only knows how much it costs, or else I’d have called someone from it.
- Sand Mountain: this is like a sandbox, but for adults, and it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere, across the highway from a great salt flat. It basically looks like God herself shook sand out of her shoes right there, leaving an enormous, well, mountain of sand. I definitely was the odd person out there, having no RV and no trailer full of ATVs behind me (and note that these are all grown men and women, often in their 40s, not college or high-school kids)…and although the entertainment there (riding your ATV up and down the mountain of sand, occasionally spilling off and falling headfirst onto the sand) is not exactly high-class, by God it looks fun. Screw high-class, I’d do it in a second if I could.
- Rolling into Sparks, NV, and the Quality Inn I’d reserved there — it’s Saturday night, and trying to pick up a room without reservations or camp around the Reno/Tahoe area seemed foolish — was a blessed relief, especially since I was starting to come down with some sort of sore throat/cold thing. (Actually, I count myself lucky that it took me this long, given all the camping and “hard living” I’d been doing…) NyQuil, a real bed, air conditioning, and decent food made all the difference in the world.
- I fell asleep there, memories of my trip in my head…and thoughts of being at home again, finally, the next day, fresh in my head.
Day 15: (Saturday, August 18, 2007) Great Basin National Park, NV to Sparks, NV.
Miles: 5792.3 + 425.1 = 6217.4 total. Current distance from home: 212 miles.
Photos: 2,889 (36.5 GB) + 113 (1.38 GB) = 3,002 (37.9 GB) total.
Next up: Lake Tahoe, and returning home…
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