Road Trip 2013: Day One

The Loneliest Road in America

September 15, 2013

Soundtrack:

• Editors -- The Weight of Your Love
• Pearl Jam -- Vs.

Six days.  Four states.  Six national parks.  One national monument.  1,800 miles on the road.  That's not a bad way to spend a week.

U.S. Route 50, NV

My original plan had been to spend two weeks and drive to Mesa Verde to see the indian ruins there.  That plan fell through when I had to cut my trip down to one week, so I came up with another destination: Bryce Canyon.  I'd been planning to hit it on the way to Mesa Verde anyway, but with this new plan it became the end point.  It's actually driveable in a single day, but I wanted to be able to relax and see some of the sights, so I decided to break it up into a series of shorter half-day drives.  I'd camp along the way and try to stick to what seemed to be scenic roads.

Sand Mountain, NV

My big problem was Nevada.  There's a reason why Nevada was the place the government used to test their atomic bombs.  Except for the small portion of Lake Tahoe that sits in the state, Nevada is a barren wasteland.  It takes about three hours to get to the state line from the Bay Area, and it would take about four hours to get to my first destination in Utah from the Nevada border.  Getting across Nevada would take about six hours, and there is basically no place to stop for the night outside of Reno, Tahoe and Las Vegas.  Well, there's one more place, Great Basin National Park.  It's just West of the Utah border.  This would be my first stop and it would take me all day to get there.  So much for half-day drives.

U.S. Route 50, NV

I'd been hoping to take Interstate 80 across Nevada.  It basically follows the route of the original Continental Railway.  From a historical perspective, that seemed like it would be interesting.  Highway 50 provides a more direct route to Great Basin, though.  It's got an interesting history as well, since it follows the route of the Pony Express.  Also, since it's not an interstate I'd be able to pull over and take pictures whenever the mood struck me.

What I didn't know until I'd driven the 110 mile stretch between Fallon and Austin--110 miles without so much as a single gas station--was that Nevada's portion of Highway 50 is known as the Loneliest Road in America.  It's a well-deserved moniker.  Austin has one gas station.  It's only seventy miles to the next town of Eureka.  It, too, has a single gas station.  It was like that all the way through Nevada and for the section I drove it in Utah.  I had the road pretty much to myself, though, so that was kind of cool.

U.S. Route 50, NV

I caught the remants of the big storm front that caused all of the flash flooding in Colorado and Utah earlier in the month.  I've seen a lot of dry river and creek beds out in the desert, but this was the first time I'd seen any running with rain water.  The rain has nowhere to go in this area of the country.  That's where the name the Great Basin comes from, it's like a big series of sinks with no outlet to the ocean.  Water runs off of the mountains and into the low lands, where it sometimes forms large salt water lakes like California's Mono Lake and Utah's Great Salt Lake.  In other areas it forms large temporary pools that evaporate fairly quickly in the dry air.  I saw a couple of these pools in fields along the drive.

I reached Great Basin National Park after sunset.  There were very few campers in park.  My campsite had a creek running directly behind it.  I roasted a couple of dogs on the fire, smoked a cigar and called it a night.  It was a long day of driving, especially since I made a lot of stops, but with all of the weather and water it made for a rather dramatic day on the road.  This would turn out to be the least interesting day on the trip and it had been far from dull.