Basin and Range

As I was driving across the Great Basin, and pretty much every time I drive across Nevada and western Utah, I think about all of the times I've driven those roads before. These roads are kind of like old friends...it's nice to catch up with them.  Like driving through Fallon, NV reminds me of hanging out with a Nevada Dept of Wildlife guy who was showing me Dixie Valley and Big and Little Soda Lakes, where some of the tui chubs I study live.  The Dixie valley populations are in a US Navy electronic warfare range.

The military bought the property from ranchers so there would be no complaints. Dixie valley is weird because there a ton of springs.  It's always a cool thing to see groundwater springs in the desert. It makes this valley lush and green,

somewhat like the Owens Valley in the fish slough area.

I remember driving home from the tui chub trip and stopping in Reno to see Pete, who'd lost his foot a few months earlier. We were both in better shape by then.

I like the shoe tree on Highway 50 east of Fallon.  How long have the shoes been up there?  I wonder if there are any pairs of climbing shoes suspended from the cottonwood.  It also strikes me as odd that the cottonwoods adjacent to the shoe tree have no shoes on them.  People are weird. The link says it's a lone cottonwood, but it's not.

Or Austin, NV, where James and I stopped to eat cherry chocolate chip cookies on the way to Rifle.  Austin has its own wikipedia page, and according to the wiki folks, it is a living ghost town.  I drove through Austin heading west to Santa Cruz to start college there back in 2000 after a few months in SE Utah on a Sierra Institute course. There were a lot of cyclists biking the loneliest highway. I thought they were crazy. A week later would be 9/11 and my sister would die.

In Ely, James and I spent the night in a hotel room on the way back from Rifle, about a week after optimistically eating cookies in Austin. I think James cooked dinner on my stove that we brought up to the room. From there we headed to Tuolumne where I took a nap before driving home to Davis. I was so drained.

Austin is a bit more progressive-seeming than the next town east, which is Eureka. I stopped to get gas here on this trip.  Eureka also has a wiki page.

From Ely to Delta, I remember camping in Ibex a few years before.

and walking across the playa

 to something that seemed much closer than it really was - some mining structure. This time I skipped Delta and Ibex and turned south on 487 and then 21 just east of Great Basin national park and flew to Milford:


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to meet up with I 15 in Beaver. I hoped I wouldn't get a flat tire in this area - there's not much around.

Every time I drive towards Delta past Ibex I think about Stanley's story about his girlfriend, and I wonder where it happened.

Now when I drive from Fallon to Ely, I notice areas like Big Smoky Valley, and Newark Valley, where I also have tui chubs. I look up and down the valleys and I don't see any water.  Where the hell are the fish?  Where is the water?  10000+ years ago these valleys were Lake Lahontan or Lake Bonneville. I'm driving through the bottom of an ancient lake.  Hard to imagine.

Basin and range lends itself to vast expanses of salty playa, the kind of space where rednecks like to do donuts and families like to take stones and write messages to passersby. There's also a surprising amount of biodiversity, mostly because of the recession of the pluvial lakes that left populations in isolation.

On the way back from Moab a few years ago, when I could barely walk and my hand wouldn't work, I stopped at a hotel south of Salt Lake City.  Showering was nearly impossible, and burned all the gobies on my hands. I remember that pretty vividly. I remember stopping in Fernley at a supermarket to stagger to the deli and order a sandwich. I sat in my car in the parking lot and I wasn't sure how much further I could make it. I made it to Reno to return Pete's rack see him and Lydia when he'd just had his amputation. His parents were visiting. A few months later I'd go check out the tui chubs with the NDOW people. I could walk like a normal person again, but life was NOT normal. I'd gotten to sleep at a hotel/casino in Yerington the night before.  Random.

At some point I want to check out Great Basin national park, and maybe head up into those roads that seem to lead nowhere to look for water and fish.  Or stop at all of those random historical markers that seem to be so common on lonely desert roads. In writing this blog I discovered this wiki page on Route 50 in Nevada.  Now I know a little more about what I'm missing when I'm flying by in a quest for some other rock, in some other place.

I usually drive these roads alone, but I've driven with a boyfriend and driven with a friend.  It's a totally different experience when you drive alone. You get to have quality time with Basin and Range, and you get it all to yourself.