Okay, we've been here before - good old Nevada. Quick catch-up: we came out of Joshua Trees NP and went over to the Las Vegas area as the gals decided that since we had no Xmas tree or pod decorations, all those lights in Las Vegas might be an adequate substitute.
The following pictures were on the internet advertising the strip and were taken by Ron Niebrugge/WildNatureImages.com. Cokie somehow misplaced the ones she took. Hmmm...too much Las Vegas???
Personally, I don’t get what the whoop is about, but you know I go where they go. We spent a few days over Xmas in an RV park in the old downtown section of Vegas near the Fremont Experience. Now that was cool as they have enclosed some of the old casinos under a huge roof which is high tech so they can run really awesome videos over your head; things like biplanes, jet fighters, skydivers, balloons, dolphins and whales. There are familiar casino signs and lights from the beginning days of Las Vegas, before “The Strip”.
We did lots of cool walks around the neighborhood, but frankly there is just too much of every thing ‘city’ for me, I’m just a country boy, you know. The Ladies did bring back some very interesting smells and great scraps from their Xmas Eve dinner at a special restaurant in the Excalibur. I heard them say it was one of the best steak dinners they had ever had and I for one will definitely agree! They had fun ‘doing the strip’ for a couple of evenings, seeing such places as the Luxor with the Tomb and Museum of King Tutankhamun, the MGM Grand; well you get the idea.
They decided we needed to make a quick trip back to Nevada City between the holidays and before the end of the year. It was something about business filings and tax preparations to be completed. This is all a foreign language to me of course and we were in town for less than two days as we had to get ‘over the summit’ between storms. At least I got to nose around my old neighborhood on Cooper Rd. for a day and again visit with old buddies.
Business completed we headed over the Sierras and stopped to play and photograph the snow and I can tell you I so wanted to slide down the slopes with all those kids, to roll and bite the snow. There is nothing quite like the taste of fresh snowflakes – the sweetness of the air and the water of good old Mother Earth all captured in one big mouthful of icy white coldness.
We decided to head due east out of Reno along Hwy. 50, supposedly looking for an area of no snow. Our next stop was in just outside of Fallon in a wondrous water area known as Fort Churchill State Park. This Fort was built in 1860 by the US Army to guard the Pony Express route and to stop supposed Indian uprisings. Aside from Fruita, in Utah’s Capitol Reef/Escalante area, these were the biggest cottonwood trees I have seen. Water is truly a miracle out in these high desert regions. I enjoyed hiking and sniffing around this campground.
As we were driving Hwy. 50 east we came across a place that Kae insisted we just had to stop and see – guess you can see why! It turned out to be extremely interesting to the Ladies and to me, but for quite different reasons!
On the way we came across this single sand dune called Sand Mountain. I thought it looked like the world’s biggest cat box, but it still had its own kind of beauty.
Out in the middle of totally nowhere we ran across another one of those curious examples of how humans need to announce their presence and leave some evidence of their passing through an area. This time it is shoes, lots and lots of shoes; not just left, but hung, in the only tree for miles. Is this some kind of ‘sole’ trip I don’t understand?
Fallon had no snow but it was colder than a Malamute’s mitt and outside of Austin the following night got us nothing but mountain snow and cold and wind and more wind. We found the RV parks in Austin to be two blips below ‘bleak’ so we drove12 miles out across the desert into a canyon looking for the Forest Service campground at Big Creek, only to find it closed, but we stayed anyway because the road was deserted and the price was way right!
The next night in Ely it was a 3 inch snow storm and a quiet New Year’s Eve all snug and warm together in the Pod. On New Year’s morning we made a right turn again and headed down Hwy. 318 to Ash Springs which was clear and beautiful.
We passed through a surprising area called the White River Narrows on New Year’s Day. Surprising because all of a sudden there is this arroyo and cliff country that was just cut into the Great Basin floor and you never know it is there until you were right in it.
We really pushed and drove all the way to Laughlin, NV and Bullhead City, AZ. Cokie has a cousin Ron and his wife, Kasha, whom we had arranged to visit. We spent the first night out in the Lake Mohave Recreational area at the Katherine’s Landing campground where I could have my leash-free romps and swims. What joy!
We took a side trip west out of Bullhead City to see some more marvelous petroglyphs at a site called Grapevine. Here there are literally hundreds chipped into the stone - mute, nearly undecipherable and thus fascinating.
The next couple of days were spent with Ron and Kasha exploring the surrounding area. They are avid hunters of Indian and mining artifacts so they go off into some really isolated areas. They took all of us, plus their two dogs Jenny and Scrubby, out to an incredible place called Secret Canyon (of course I won’t tell where it is, just to keep the secret). There is evidence that the Indians have used the caves and springs for hundreds if not thousands of years. The pictographs here are currently unprotected, though the Arizona Dept. of Game and Fish or the BLM are trying to get it deeded over to one of them. We met a nice young female ranger out there tracking desert big horn sheep and showed her some of the pictographs up in the caves. It was a great 2 to 3 mile hike with perfect weather. I could run all I wanted, lie down in the cool spring pools and track all the smells and scat I could find. What a great day and a huge thank you to Ron and Kasha for sharing this secret place.
I got to stay home one day with crazy Jenny, (did I mention she is a loosely wired Jack Russell Terrier who can run around non-stop for three miles or three hours at a time?), while the gals went off to the little mining town of Oatman out on old Hwy 66. It is a cute, quaint tourist trap where burros rule. They are left over remnants of the mining days and the citizens have given them full run of the town as they are an incredible tourist draw. They wander the street, (there is only one, really), mooching off everyone they can find. The stores sell proper burro food like carrots and hay pellets and everybody seems happy. If I were a burro and not a fabulous canine I would definitely put my doggie dish in Oatman!
The Oatman Hotel touts the bedroom where Clark Gable and Carol Lombard stayed after their marriage in 1939. Not a whole lot else to see except the bar and restaurant which have a fortune in dollar bills stuck to the walls and ceilings. People have signed and dated the bills and stuck them up for decades to commemorate their visit.
It's that human urge to leave traces of their “passings", like the ‘Shoe Tree” we saw between Fallon and Austin, NV or the strange graffiti along the railroad tracks outside of Joshua Tree NP and out in the desert of eastern Nevada. (Okay, how many remember the carvings on the aspens in Utah?) You get our drift. Here’s another example of this need to enhance Mother Nature’s beauty- mesquite trees decorated for the Xmas holidays just outside of town. Theme appears to have been the Purple Hat Club with some hats and some shoes. Go figure things all over them!
We stayed one more night out at Katherine’s Landing on Lake Mohave so I could have another romp and swim; lucky guy that I am, then struck out for Canyon De Chelly, AZ.
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