Across the Great Basin

The Great Salt Lake Basin....under the blazing sun and into the brilliant white reflection from the salt, folks walk out to test its substance.  I could not stand the burning rays more than a few minutes.   On the way, we had passed at least two cars that had ventured off the highway to test their ability to drive on its surface.  Both were immediately mired in sand beneath of hard baked surface....we gave them a "tsk, tsk" as we sped by on the paved surface. 

But, then, beyond this flat land drive, the western hills emerge.  Nevada that funny antithesis of Mormon Utah...maybe not funny, maybe sad, to judge from the faces of slot machine players early the next morning in Elko.  After getting my own smart phone, I could sympathize easier with those folks who seemed frozen, visually stupified, by the rolling lights, the loud "ching, ching", the constant stimulation, the jarring lights of the uncrowded casinos.  So much to occupy the neural pathways...so many synapses to load at one time...so many ways to lose active consciousness. 

Road trip

 

Charlotte and I decided to take a road trip west...a time "to bond" given that this fall will see her on the East Coast for extended periods of grandmothering.  We called friends in California, planned a short stay, and headed northwest to Wyoming, then west on I-80.

  

Day one we came to Green River...the place where John Wesley Powell started down river in his 1869 exploration of the Colorado.  He rode out from Chicago on the just finished Union Pacific railroad whose tracks still carry the weight of rail cars.  In the picture above, a line of cars can be seen just on the far side of the river. The interstate runs parallel to the railroad in most places.  Where rivers run, the railroad rides its banks...skirting the deeper canyons where necessary.  The railroad follows earlier wagon wheel roads...pioneer wagon trains needed water to survive.  Railroad engines needed water to create the steam to pull the passenger and cargo cars.  So the trip is one of geography and history...even if automobile drivers, tuned into their Sirius satellite radios fail to notice.  

 

Mosquito Pass or rather Mosquito No Pass

 

A made-up day.  Got up around 5:30, put on some clothes, walked down to the admin building, made some coffee, sent out a blog, caught up on email....   Car battery dead but OLT is used to that happening all the time so they just rode me up a charger and it turned right over.  

Decided to drive to Leadville...on the way, studied the maps, and decided to go home over Mosquito Pass....a 4 wheel drive road that extends from 7th street Leadville to Alma on the road between Breckenridge and Fairplay.   I knew the lower part of the Mosquito Pass Road, having used cross country skis to make tracks this past winter.  So I headed up and up...

And the vistas opened and then opened again.  Amazing. 

But that did not happen to the road, however, which was the width of my vehicle in places.  A road of rocks...granite boulders...ain't no biking lane here....

 

It was just around the bend on the photo below that I came to a snow drift whose depth I could not fathom and over which no tires had ever passed.  A sense of relief because I was beginning to doubt if the Explorer was really up to it...e.g.  what is its history on tipping over on high mountain passes? 

 

On the way back down I stopped at an old mining operation....tailings from mining tunnels dot the lower hillsides.   This was The Diamond Mine.  Don't know what they found....probably I could find out from histories and old records in the town hall.   For now it's just stuff rusting away under a hot sun.   Oh well, time to take another road home (hey how about I-70?)

Watching the weather

Distant thunder rolled down the pass in the late morning.  From the back porch, you can see slow dark clouds pulling a narrow line of rain across the valley floor.  Like a gigantic gray shower curtain.  The clouds come out of the north-west, not a massive storm this...just some drops for a very dry land.  

The back porch has a few metal chairs.  No pillows.  No dynamic other than the sight of clouds, forming and reforming, thunder rolling louder.  At first a scent of rain.  Then a few drops.  Then more.  Then hail.  Not everyone was watching...some folks caught up in the day to day, e.g., gotta get the tent up...alas a bit too late. 

And then it is over...sun comes back.  A group of three sisters occupy the front porch...having an annual get together...playing cards, eating cherries, laughing...enjoying being with one another.  Enjoying the day.  No rain can dampen this party. 

My writings have become more peripatetic of late.  I continue to write in my journal, if not daily, every few days to capture the experience and try and make some sense of it..  But to blog requires some combination of photograph and narrative that requires a kind of story line.  And these lines seem to become tangled at times.   

And which is why, after only having finished my Bike Tour of Colorado (55, 66, 84 and 91 miles…the longest day was my best), I spent a week at home.  Then came back up to the mountains.  Spent the night at the hostel in Salida…wandered downtown in the early evening…got some ice cream at Safeway.  In the morning, I got to the Café Dawn around 6:30.   Ordered my latte then went outside again to take a picture on this patriotic 4^th of July…and into the viewfinder walked Steve and Tamara…owners of the house I had rented this past February.  Salida...a small town.   

Then onto the Orient Land Trust….checked in….set up my tent on a slope open to the wind to cut down on mosquitoes.  Spent time in the sauna, the swimming pool, the party pool, the top pool, and the newly accessible Meadow Pool.  There is a natural quality to the pools here...the way they are constructed...low rock walls holding the water heated by deep faults in the earth.  It is not crowded...this week after the 4th...no fireworks here.  Just pools that you can have by yourself...you, the pool, the hillside and the valley beyond.