Springs and the Calligraphy Highway pt 3: Meadow Mountains

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After a gentle walk along the river an reservoir at Pine Valley, we packed up. We were invited to stay another night, but Monday will come, alas, and with it bring work.

We drove back out and turned north. A few miles from Central is the site of a notorious, inexplicable mass murder: the Mountain Meadows massacre. There are four separate sites; a men's memorial and a women's memorial, a gravesite with cairn, and an overlook of the cairn and the valley where the tragedy took place in autumn 1857.

No one really knows why the massacre happened. The Fancher pioneer party, who had camped near a spring to let their beasts forage, were besieged, during which several men died. Then, under a white flag, over a hundred men, women and children were murdered. Only the toddlers were spared - those thought too young to talk. Apparently at least one baby died from the same bullet that killed its father. There is a report that some of the girls were raped before they were murdered.

There's no doubt that the mass murder was carried out by local Mormons and Indians working in concert. One local Mormon leader ended up taking the fall for it. John D. Lee went on the run (back when that was totally a thing in the wild west) and operated Lee's Ferry above the north-eastern end of the Grand Canyon for several years before he was indicted and executed. (Before there was a bridge at Navajo Crossing, the ferry service a few miles upstream was the last even remotely predictable crossing of the Colorado for a few hundred miles. The area was extremely remote - it's still fairly remote! - and they didn't arrest him until 1874.)

But really, John Lee can't actually have been the only one who was responsible - why was he made the scapegoat? Why was this thing done in the first place? How can it ever have seemed like a good idea to anyone? There were plenty of inflammatory factors, but how the transition was made from outrage over trespassing, even allegations of well-poisoning, etc to planned mass murder including children, is beyond me - maybe always will be beyond me. There are some failures of imagination that I can't feel are failures of character.

The overlook is peaceful enough, and so is the valley's gently rolling, tree-dotted, fenced pastureland. The landmark site is well cared for and has been brought into being by the descendants of the murderers and the victims. It is a good place for quiet reflection. As we read the names of the dead, my sight blurred. Sometimes, we humans are a strange and terrible species, and sometimes it is a strange and terrible world we make.

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.