Fault Lines

I owe Nevada an apology as I had no idea how beautiful and interesting the middle of the state is, and I watched it flow by on Tuesday, desert valleys followed by mountain ranges, scrubby bushes and piñon pines alternating all day long. And the road surface is smooth, the sort of asphalt I dreamed of in Mexico. 

Silly me as I had anticipated a long dreary heat filled drive across a vast flat Mojave-type desert and instead I found variety I had never expected on America’s Loneliest Highway. 

And yes the middle of the day is hot, 95 to 100 degrees. Rusty needs frequent watering and I test the asphalt before he burns his paws on it. But that’s between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon, the hours we typically choose to drive. 

I like to get up early and go for a walk with my reluctant dog who is getting middle aged and less curious about new exciting places to sniff. Then we lounge around and drink coffee and do a couple of chores and do our exercise video (The Body Project filled with self effacing British humor, videos we discovered during Covid). We’re on the road around ten as the air heats up and the cabin air conditioner keeps us comfortable. Tony Hillerman is the current book on tape we are listening to as we roll, Navajo and desert drama seems suitable. 

It was Layne who said “let’s go!” When I pointed out the road sign to the Earthquake Faults just thirty minutes into our drive from Hidden Cave east of Fallon.

She is nothing if not adventurous and she is determined this trip to see as much as we can. During Covid we traveled isolated rarely stopping in towns and now, even though we still have some tiredness and coughing after our first Covid bout she is determined to see what we can see on the road and live as normally as possible.  

My grand cock up in Belize when we drove  into clay and got stuck all day and broke the radiator has made her rather nervous around sand and soft gravel. As the Belize chaos was purely my fault I am not in the strongest moral position if I choose to say “C’mon, we can do it, it’ll be fine” when we spot a dubious dirt trail. You can imagine.

We have Dunlop all terrain tires on the front after we got stuck in Guatemala (not my fault) and as we winched ourselves out we tore up my lovely Michelin Agilis front tires. The tire shop in Coban had these AT3s that fit the Promaster and we took them. They have been excellent, reasonably quiet on asphalt and great in the modest dirt we drive. 

Layne vetoed the side trail to the fault itself so we didn’t peer into any available abyss and we were left looking at the hills in some puzzlement. I’m not really sure what to look for when fault spotting but it was a pleasant excursion up the rubble hill at 15 mph. The van did fine which helped calm Layne’s off road nerves and we saw rocks poking up  in what may have been something to do with earthquakes. 

Oh and Rusty got his walk. 

There are mysterious instruments presumably monitoring geological activity and rather them than me. This desolation is for scientists to revel in as we civilians lacked a full explanation of what was going on here. 

The road was described as “minimally maintained” but it wasn’t bad at all. We just drive slowly as we are carting our house around with us and we are in no hurry to break anything mechanical or domestic. 

The plan was to stop in Austin and buy the worlds most delicious roadside burger. The food truck at Champs gas station in Austin is praised to the skies on all traveler forums and I warned Layne it might not be open in low season. She called ahead because the Verizon phone signal was surprisingly strong in these desolate spaces and got the bad news: they can’t find staff to operate the food truck in summer. Yay! I was right! 

They had the worlds slowest pump dispensing regular at $4:66 a gallon so we put $15 in to make sure we weren’t on fumes by the time we got to Ely (pronounced by the locals as “Eee-Lea” like the town in England not like Eli in the Bible) where we hoped to find cheaper gas.

The town itself wasn’t ugly on the main drag but the place looked rolled up and closed for the summer. We wound our way out of Austin and the valley it huddles in and kept driving east. 

Next up: the Pony Express. It turns out Highway 50 was built on the usual pioneer trekking routes to California but in 1860 mail service connected St Louis to Carson City, the silver mining center by horse delivered mail. 

A year later the Piny Express passed into immortal legend and was replaced by telegraph wires and stage coaches, and we stopped to admire the remains of those buildings at Cold Spring named presumably for…

You can’t help but think of  the people who lived here and made lives in these stark places as having heroic qualities. I don’t doubt in real

life they were probably  as quirky and selfish and annoying as any of us but they were pioneers at the leading edge of a new way of life. 

I read a book years ago about a family who trekked to Weaverville in far Northern California and made lives for themselves trading on the new frontier. I read their astonishment at learning on the day it happened of the death of President Lincoln the day after he was shot in distant Washington. That momentous message must have passed through these ruins. 

Imagine tonking along here with all your worldly possessions and a string of oxen covering twenty miles on a very good day. Or even burping along in your Model T Ford on the Lincoln Highway that was transformed here into US Highway 50. 

I wonder if I was tough enough to be like them. We found cheap gas in Eureka at $3:94 a gallon of regular which at least seemed cheap to us. The pump took American Express (Hilton Points!) even though it took an age to approve my account. It was just another day on the road looking for a place to sleep.  

Our first two attempts to find iOverlander free wilderness parking failed… weren’t we surprised to see them taken in July, low season! 

We heard thunder and got some rain drops, then the temperature sank to 79 degrees as we reached 7,000 feet with the promise of a cool night among the piñon on third attempt to find a spot. 

Darkness enclosed us while we had sausage and onions for dinner with mashed potatoes and a fresh green salad and cherries for dessert (eat your hearts out hard tack pioneers!) and the wind whistled as we pulled up the blankets and turned out the electric lights. Oh and I turned on my CPAP. It’s tough out here living van life like a sort of pioneer.