Salt and Light

The Trip – Day 14

Mariposa, California – Fernley, Nevada

313 miles

and

The Trip – Day 15

Fernley, Nevada – Salt Lake City, Utah

Salt Flats

479 miles

The next several days were to be traveling days. Our next park would be Grand Teton National Park, over 1,100 miles away in Wyoming. We were torn between making good time and having an easy ride on the interstate to a reserved hotel in western Nevada or having a very scenic drive to that same hotel through the Sierra Nevadas which had the potential of being the Road to Hell La Honda revisited (See Day 10...). We were worn out from the heat and crowds of Yosemite the day before, so I regret to say we took the faster, less scenic, cowardly route through Sacramento to the ubiquitous Interstate 80 and headed east.

Orchards and palm trees

Flowers in the highway median

The route was not without its charms. The farther north we had driven in California, the better I liked it. Though still bright and sunny, this area of northern-eastern-central California was cooler and greener than the places we had previously driven through. The orchards and farms continued along the road, sometimes lined with precisely placed palm trees. The colorful roses and oleander we had seen in the median of Route 99 north of Bakersfield continued into the Sacramento area. As we headed east toward Nevada, the landscape started to resemble Colorado, with evergreen-covered mountains, the trees appearing to grow out of solid rock. We stopped at an overlook near Donner Lake, north of Lake Tahoe, for some picture-taking. The snow-capped Sierras lay to our south, and we would be seeing them well into Nevada.  We continued along Interstate 80, following the pleasant Truckee River until we arrived at Fernley, Nevada, our destination for the night. Our previous venture into Nevada, when we had our brief surreal drive down the Las Vegas Strip on Day 7, did not prepare us for the fact that in Nevada, there are casinos EVERYWHERE. Fernley was a nice small town, one of the last with a wide variety of hotels, restaurants, gas stations and stores as one headed east along I 80. We checked into the hotel and went to find someplace to eat. We found a very nice Denny's – with a casino attached (!) - and had a nice meal marred only by the smell of cigarette smoke wafting in from the casino. I realized it had been a very long time since I smelled cigarette smoke. I was to find over the next few days that the Marlboro Man is still alive and well and living in the west...

Donner Lake

Leaving the Sierra Nevadas behind

Day 15 was an even longer day's drive than the day before, much of it through Nevada, then Utah, our destination for the night being Salt Lake City. I had been warned that Nevada was a tedious state to drive through, but, again, it was fascinating in a not-the-midwest kind of way. It strangely reminded me of Pennsylvania. We have driven through Pennsylvania, end to end, many times in the years we have lived in Illinois when we go east to visit family. Pennsylvania is pretty, but after 400 miles of it you begin to wonder if you are seeing the same dozen green domed mountains again and again...and again. Nevada was oddly similar – 400 plus miles of scenic, somewhat barren mountains, repeated again and again...and again. Vast stretches of it had no services off the interstate, so The Next Exit book proved to again be a wise investment, making it easy to plan where to get gas and have lunch.

Nevada...

...and more Nevada...

...and again...

We left Nevada and entered into Utah in the afternoon and had an opportunity for another “surprise adventure”. It was a beastly hot day, with temperatures well into the 100s, when the landscape around us started to turn white - really white, like fields of snow. I suspected hallucinations from the relentless sun, but roadside signs informed us we were approaching the Bonneville Salt Flats, the site of land speed records. This area is part of the Great Salt Lake Desert, a large dry lake in northern Utah, west of Salt Lake City. Of course, there was an overlook/rest stop off of I 80, and, of course, we stopped. I began to wonder what the average summer temperature must be in that area as the rest stop had shade shelters for the cars as well as the picnic tables. We spent some time in the shaded overlook, watching people walking out on the salt flats, looking not unlike insufficiently-dressed winter hikers crossing a frozen lake. Had it not been so brutally hot, one of us would have joined them just to say she had done it...and one of us wouldn't want to get his feet salty. O.K., perhaps that's unfair. There was a foot wash available next to the flats, so maybe both of us would have gotten our feet salty... 

Frozen lake or hot salt flat?

So hot even the cars get sheltered at this rest stop

Foot wash at the salt flats

The point of going somewhere...is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.  - from In the Jungle – Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

Next:

Falling for the Falls

The Trip – Day 16

Salt Lake City, Utah – Rexburg, Idaho

Idaho Falls

243 miles