Lincoln County rematch

John Muir once said "The mountains are calling and I must go." I hear it a little differently ... it's the desert that calls. (This is a mystery to me. More on it anon.) For now, the desert was calling us and we had even managed to persuade the teen to go, so on Friday we packed up Harry's boot good and tight with a thrilling array of camping equipment, shut the cats in with all their necessities, and got on the freeway north. We had unfinished business with Lincoln County.

Arrow Canyon Range NV:
The dark grey band makes the fault lines conspicuous even at 70 mph.
And look! Moon!

The second time up a highway can be a little as a song that was sung or a story told. That is to say, it can be a bit tedious or it can catch your breath like it did the first time.

Having fallen for Nevada's stripy hills and mountains, it's never less than a quiet pleasure for me to drive through its valleys and see those improbable blocks of rock slowly sinking into their blankets of sand and sediment.

And on this particular drive, there's a stretch of 93 after the road turns north for the first time and the valley is bounded on the east by the spectacular Arrow Canyon range, gorgeous with horizontal bands of colour in the early evening light. The moon already risen, and that crazy Nevada blue sky ...

Traffic had slowed us down a bit leaving LV, so instead of enjoying the sunset at our campsite, we enjoyed it with the almost full moon over the Delamar Valley as we passed through.

Kershaw-Ryan State Park has a modest first-in, best-dressed campground. It was about a third full when we arrived and made a couple of circuits in the gathering twilight - looking and calculating for daytime shade. We pitched the tents hurriedly by lamp- and moon-light, which definitely makes it sound more romantic and enjoyable than it was, then sat down to a supper of cold baked chicken and herbed sweet potato salad. (Somewhere during this period the mosquitoes discovered me. I'm not sure why I got the 'most delicious' vote ... anyway, the welts have mostly gone now.) We didn't stay up late to watch the stars, although we did take some time to enjoy the cliffs by moonlight. (Also, there was a Welcome Frog or at least a resident frog by the ablutions block and I saw it eat a bug, just like that. It is these small things that make me happy.) A campfire would wait for Saturday night.

Jacket keeps it warm :)

I was up bright and early at about 4:30 on Saturday morning. The sky was already lightening and it
felt cold (well, I say cold. It was probably 16 or 17 C.) I got the coffee going and enjoyed the sunrise, painting colour everywhere. The campground, in the lower part of the canyon, is about 20 years old. (It was rebuilt after its predecessor was washed out by flash floods.) On either side the ash-flow tuff cliffs catch the light beautifully at every hour of day.

Stove and coffeepot did their mighty work; yoghurt and cereal (or thereabouts) for breakfast. Then Simon and I went for a walk up the canyon while the teen stayed in camp reading.

I'm still nursing plantar fasciitis (or fascists, as autocorrect would have you believe) so we took the car up a mile or so to the visitor parking and walked from there. The canyon overlook walk winds up through gardens and pleasure-grounds (I think that's the right word when there's a wading pool and a terrain for playing horse-shoes?), past 40 foot high thickets of wild grape. The trail then divides, into or across a wash. We went across and up through juniper scrub, the trail twisting back on itself to traverse layers of rock to the mesa above, which afforded a view over the canyon to the valley beyond and even a glimpse of the Union Pacific line.

We saw deer or maybe bighorn sheep tracks and, more excitingly, big cat tracks - could have been bobcat or mountain lion, hard to tell. The prints were about 3 inches wide, and some of them were very clear, but too hard to photograph. 

To return, we scrambled down into the wash and followed the riverbed. Whatever big cat had been up to the summit had also been down in the wash - possibly to drink, possibly to hunt. We skirted a bulrush-fringed pool guarded by a tarantula hawk wasp (which is, alone, a sufficient argument against a benevolent creator) and scrambled down a couple of small dry waterfalls. Then I came round a corner and saw a snake - the first one I've seen alive and face to face in the wild here, as opposed to watching its flickering back depart. It tasted the air and high-tailed it into the grasses and low shrubs. I'm pretty sure it was a mountain gartersnake, most of a metre long, with handsome pale lemon and dark green markings.

Back at camp, it was time for a nap before we headed out for the afternoon.

Itinerary

Friday: From LV, I15 then 93 through Coyote Springs, Alamo, ET junction, and northeast past Delamar to Caliente. Turn south on 317 to Kershaw-Ryan State Park.
Saturday: Kershaw-Ryan State Park ...

Springs and the Calligraphy Highway interlude: the Taj Mahal

Our tent is the Taj Mahal. (We probably look more like vintage comedy than these guys do, while putting it up. The cats stayed home.) I can stand upright in it, and we can fit a queen size air bed. The thing has a garage (not shown in the video). Next time, I'm planning to take along the gorgeous flag bunting our oldest girl made for our wedding and drape it festively about for a proper castle effect. I'm sure the hipsters in their roof-boxed Civic hatchbacks laugh in scorn ... frankly I'm too old and chronically sleep deprived to care. Give me the comfy, thank you very much.

We divided and conquered, with Simon putting up the tent and getting it ready to sleep in, while I tended the fire, grilled the steak, baked spuds in the ashes, and set the table (and, mind you I'm not confirming this, possibly sampled the beer). Also smoked my clothes and hair, as you do.

I've tried quite a few kinds of cooking, but this is actually the first time I've cooked steak on an open fire. It was terrific, I have to say. Steak's pretty hard to mess up. And yes, we did have veges as well.

We enjoyed the sunset as we ate. Then, tidied up, sat round in our comfy camp chairs, getting up to put more wood on the fire and more layers of clothes and blankets on ourselves as it got darker and colder. It was a toss-up whether we could stay awake for the sky to get all the way dark - this doesn't happen until nearly 10 at this time of year, and it had been a two-blog-posts-worth day. We managed it though, just barely. Long enough to admire Jupiter, Mars and Saturn delineating the ecliptic, and such a lavish plenty of stars (it was clear.)

I decided to make up my own constellations, but now I am decidedly disappointed to discover that my favourite one already exists. I was starting to think of constellations as making approximately as much sense as sun signs, but now I see I was wrong. It's a tiara, though, not a crown, clearly.

From http://www.topastronomer.com/StarCharts/Constellations/Corona-Borealis.php

Who doesn't love a tiara, right?

Right.

Itinerary

Well, not really, because it was all in the same place. Here

Springs and the Calligraphy Highway pt 2

Last time, on Desert Sage Adventure, we had caught our breath after taking Harry on a whirlwind rough road adventure ...

Highway 93 is also called the Great Basin Highway, and one of these days we will take it all the way up to Great Basin National Park. But that day was not today. We would turn further east at Panaca, cross into Utah and head down 18 to turn off at Central.

Before that, coffee. The Koolatron fits a lot of stuff, but I just didn't have room for iced coffee. And yet paradoxically, we ourselves had all kinds of room for iced coffee. Caliente seemed like a bigger dot on the map than any of the others. We drove up over the mountains - passing by Oak Springs Summit Trilobite Area, of which you, dear readers, will likely hear more in the future. The road dips down into yet another gorgeous little valley. Houses dot the landscape and we tell each other this would be a great place to live, and the sandstone cliffs over you would teach you a sense of perspective and also be just the loveliest distraction, and we stupidly look out for 'for sale' signs.

Then around another bend, and we are in Caliente, quaint wooden buildings everywhere and a grand mission style railway station. On the far side of the tracks, a couple of blocks of shops ... aha! The Brandin Iron. Reckon they'll sell us a cup of coffee or a root beer float.

Best wait staff service we've had for ages, she knew when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em. I don't think we waited more than a second or two for anything at any point, and yet she never seemed pushy or in our faces. Her suggestion of onion rings was a good one (well, they tasted great. Nutritionally, hmm ... they had veges in them?) A good stop.

But still miles to go. Coming down into Panaca is an exciting experience; there's a stopping place / pullout  half way down the hill, without any barrier, that has a hundred foot drop to cattle pastures. This, too, was my first conscious drive-through of desert crop circles. They are just as green in person, but somehow less improbable in appearance than from the air:

We turned east onto 319 at Panaca - there are hot springs there that are still on the to-do list, but otherwise it aspires only to the style of census-designated place with one or two notable old buildings. We continued into another lovely basin-and-range valley, and crossed into Utah.

A calligraphy road, UT 319

Where the road maintenance schedule is out of sync with Nevada's.
And they've a full and frank understanding of this desert crop circle thing:

No, it's not a video game. I'm not sure you could make this stuff up - no one would believe. As always in the south-west - see green, and wonder where the water comes from. Here, a close inspection of the map (click the image above to see it) shows more than one canal and a creek that hardly looks up to the job. Since I read Cadillac Desert I'm even more aware of looking for where the water comes from, who controls it, and what they do with it

Anyway, from the ground it all looks pretty normal - if we weren't in a desert - maybe barring the irrigation machinery, but nothing surprised me enough to stop and photograph it. We turned south at Beryl Junction through more improbable greenliness (it;s my new word, do you like it?). The day was getting on, so we did not stop at Mountain Meadows, but drove through more hills (it's not called basin and range for nothing), turned east again at Central and slowly (so as not to disturb the cattle) up the small road to Pine Valley. (They might understand crop circles but they have something to learn about grazing the long acre.)

Pine Valley is full of, well, pines. Principally Ponderosa, or Yellow pines. Also oak trees. It's cool and high and tucked into a semicircle of mostly wooded mountains that feed the beginning of the Santa Clara River. It is every bit as charming as it sounds! And yes, we stayed there, camping ... Simon managed to get the last available Saturday night site until August ... and yes I will tell you the story ... next time.

Itinerary

Saturday: ... Caliente NV, Pine Valley UT.