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Published: October 16th 2008
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 It froze again overnight and fortunately Richard had disconnected and drained the pressure hose. This is getting to be routine for us, although not a happy one, to be sure. With an eye to our escape to the coast, we planned a long drive today, and the weather and road conditions did not disappoint. It was a beautiful dry sunny blue sky day, just great for traveling and viewing all the wonderful scenery going by. Not a particularly good day for photos, although we did take a few, and one or two ‘traveling down the road’ videos.
Nevada Highway 50 has the self-professed reputation of being the ‘loneliest highway in America’. And it lived up to its reputation, although Utah 21 provided stiff competition. We could count on one hand (sometimes one finger) the number of vehicles encountered in any given hour. At one point, we stopped the truck in the middle of the road, Kayla stepped out to take a few pictures, and nothing came along in either direction.
We can’t avoid talking about the snow. Remember we said there was a snow forecast for the Grand Canyon that didn’t materialize? Well, it
did materialize further north. Most of Nevada and Southwest Utah had a big dump of snow over the weekend, along with the widespread deep freeze. We saw the remnants of that today as we drove through many valleys and mountain ranges, wending our way west towards Reno.
Fortunately what we saw were just remnants of the blizzard, with somewhat warmer weather melting most of it in the past two days, and a forecast of more warming to come. The owner of the Silver Sky Lodge RV park in Eureka Nevada, where we stopped for the night, was full of stories about how a family reunion this past weekend was almost spoiled by the blizzard because people coming from far away couldn’t get through the Sierras to get here. He said we were lucky to be coming through today instead of two days ago. And here we’d thought ourselves unlucky to have the deep freeze in the Grand Canyon, with no snow.
Enough about snow and cold. Today, we noticed a huge pollution haze hanging over the valleys of Utah and Nevada. At the Grand Canyon, there were displays explaining that this was coming primarily from southern California. Wow!
Imagine how the people living in these remote valleys here feel about getting hazed by pollution created many, many miles away.
From Beaver UT to Baker NV Highway 21 is about 100 miles of unique scenery.
The Geologists call it Basin and Range country. Now we can see what they mean. We are travelling west and the mountains and valleys trend north / south. Every 20 miles is a repeat of a wide treeless valley followed by a climb of 1,000 feet through a mountain pass. These wide gently sloping valleys are sage brush and sand, no trees. The road is surveyor straight, the speed 65 mph and no traffic ahead or behind - great driving conditions.
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