Day 153

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Obfuscator writes: Nevada takes up one small page in our big atlas. There's lots of states that take up two or more. Wisconsin takes up two. Let me tell you, for a one page state, Nevada is enormous. It took us all day to drive from one side of it to the other, and that was even the narrow part of the state.

We started off the day in Ely, which shares the name, and one other important trait with the one we're more familiar with in Minnesota. Namely, both Ely's are the last bastion of civilization before you hit wilderness. Mainly, the similarities end there. Ely, Nevada has lots of casinos, like basically every place in which people live in the state. Ely, Nevada is surrounded by a cold desert, rather than pleasant places to canoe.

We headed out of this wretched hive of scum and villainy and into the wild, toward Great Basin National Park. The drive involved a lot of going up and down, which we later found out is because the Great Basin Desert is actually made up of many big basins. We finally got to the National Park, and discovered that pretty much all of it was shut down, at least by road. They said we were more than welcome to snowshoe or ski up to Wheeler Peak (10,000 ft), but since we were really not at all prepared for that contingency, we opted not to take advantage of the fine winter sports opportunities. The visitor's center did have a 5000 year old tree that they decided to cut down for science.

Luckily for us, Great Basin is also home of Lehman Caves, which though not terribly large, is a really well decorated cave. It had a bunch of the regular stalactites and stalagmites, as well as a nice assortment of helictites and shields, which though we may have seen before, had never been pointed out to us in a cave. Shields are like two rock plates pressed together, and as they develop, well, they look like shields. Really nifty.

The tour guide was sort of cold at first, but she warmed up to us gradually, and the tour became a lot nicer. It gradually came out that she was a bit of a psycho environmentalist, and was of the opinion that the whole cave should be shut down to allow it to heal. Never mind the fact that for the cave to “heal” would take hundreds, if not thousands of years. It was a bit off putting though, and also was annoying because they don't allow tripods into the cave, so my opportunities for good photos were extremely limited. I guess I should consider myself lucky though, since our guide actually wanted to prohibit cameras entirely.

When we left the cave, we began driving west, back to Ely, and across the state on Highway 50, which is called the Loneliest Highway. If you drive 50, you'll see why it's called that. In the 300+ miles between Ely and Carson City, we hit basically two towns. Everything else is empty. Not just in the sense of ranch empty, like the Dakotas, but empty empty. There are no signs of human existence there, except for the road you're on. You can go hours without seeing another car or structure.

Still, it's a pretty drive, since almost the entire state is mountainous and lovely.

We eventually pulled into Carson City, and sought out our campground. After seeing the price on it, and hearing a weather report that called for a good amount of precipitation (which could have turned to wintry mix), we opted for yet another motel. We've turned into cowards, evidently. At any rate, we checked in, and found a decent Indian Restaurant for dinner, before heading back to the motel to play some computer games. Awesome, old turn based strategy games.

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Comments

[Mom]

cave formations
I think your cave pictures are some of the best of the trip. It looks like the cave has a wide variety of formations to study. Love, Mom

[Kipx]

helictite soda
Ok, but how are "soda straw" cave formations different than "helictites," or are soda straws technically a kind of helictites?

[Obfuscator]

Soda straws aren't helictites, they're tiny stalactites that haven't really fully formed yet. Helictites push out sideways, soda straws are much more conventional, if new and delicate.