Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 23:48:06 -0600
Reply-To: "Donald Baxter / Iowa City, Iowa" <onanov@MINDSPRING.COM>
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From: "Donald Baxter / Iowa City, Iowa" <onanov@MINDSPRING.COM>
Subject: Love Notes and Ghosts on a Lonely Road (NYTimes)
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(Note: the Vanagon content here is that Mr Dixon is driving a Syncro Camper
on this trip.)
DB
Love Notes and Ghosts on a Lonely Road
By CHRIS DIXON
PRECARIOUSLY straddling a ridgeline atop the nation's tallest sand dune,
Rick Seth takes a moment to explain his addiction to dune buggies. "I like
to call it anger management," he says. "It's like a roller coaster that
never quits." With that, he guns his muscular Volkswagen-powered sand rail
buggy, and we fall 600 feet down the gritty, black-diamond slope of Nevada's
Sand Mountain at 70 miles per hour. Then we turn around, and do it again -
only faster.
Rising above the dry bed of prehistoric Lake Lahontan, Sand Mountain is just
one of many extraordinary stops along Nevada's portion of Highway 50, a
transcontinental road that, in the era of the interstate, stands largely
forgotten. The 400-mile-long stretch from Carson City to the Great Basin
National Park (one of America's least visited and most remote National
Parks) has been nicknamed America's Loneliest Highway. But what it may lack
in traffic it more than makes up for in uncluttered vistas and a sense of
driving close to history and natural wonders like Sand Mountain, one of
seven dunes in the country known for "booming," resonating like a kettle
drum or a pipe organ when it is hit by strong winds.
According to historians of the road, like Jamie Jenson, whose Web site,
RoadtripUSA.com, features a trip along Highway 50, the designation dates
back to a mid-1980's Life magazine article that warned of the road's lack of
services and sites. Though locals were at first incensed by it, said June
Shaputis, a historian with the White Pine Historical and Archaeology
Society, in Ely, Nev., they soon adopted it as a marketing gimmick. These
days, drivers can order a Loneliest Highway Survival Kit from the Nevada
Tourism Commission, including a kind of scavenger hunt map that merchants
and museums will stamp for visitors as they cross the state. According to
estimates for 2002 by the Nevada Department of Transportation, Highway 50's
loneliness is actually a function of where you are on it. In downtown Carson
City, an estimated 24,000 cars pass daily. Farther east, in Eureka, the
number drops to 2,150 per day, while on the long stretches in between, as
few as 580 cars might drive by in a given 24 hours.
I didn't bother to pick up a Loneliest Highway map when I left Carson City,
rolling through the historic downtown and then through a vast, barren desert
valley pocked with trailer homes. Not far out of town I took the turnoff for
Virginia City, once a booming mining town of more than 30,000 (the Comstock
Lode was discovered in the hills there in 1859, eventually giving up over a
billion dollars in bullion), now home to fewer than 1,000 people. The town
got a boost in the 1960's when "Bonanza," though filmed in California, was
set nearby, but these days the main attraction is a shop- and saloon-lined
Main Street, and a quirky diversion called The Way It Was Museum. There,
visitors can follow the town's rise - Samuel L. Clemens came here in about
1861 to work for The Territorial Enterprise newspaper; Piper's Opera House
(a must-see) opened in 1863 - and its decline in the early 1900's after the
gold ran out.
After a night at the Gold Hill Hotel, Nevada's oldest, I headed east again.
Outside of town, Highway 50 passes a disintegrating drive-in movie screen
and lonely dirt roads with names like Break-a-Heart Lane, and then climbs
through the 6,000-foot Dead Camel Range before descending onto the vast
basin of Lake Lahontan and the town of Fallon. Home to the Navy
pilot-training program known as Top Gun, and a quaint main street, Fallon
stands as an oddly bustling desert outpost. Just east of town, the Grimes
Point Historic Site/Hidden Cave Archaeological Site rises along an ancient,
wave-splashed shore. There, Indians once hunted for antelope and left their
mark on the black basalt rocks in a series of petroglyphs, some more than
7,000 years old.
AFTER hiking a few miles through the area to admire the etchings of turtles,
birds and strange symbols - and jumping at the odd sonic boom - I watched as
a monstrously wheeled black pickup truck roared up to the site. Its driver,
Steve Price, 26, was soon joined by several friends. Why had Mr. Price
jacked his $30,000 truck up so high? "I just got bored," he said. "The
longer you live around here, the bigger your trucks get. We like to run over
rocks with them - though preferably not ones with pictures on them."
Heading toward Sand Mountain, Highway 50 runs along the route once traveled
by the Pony Express, and in the shadow of the huge dune lies the remains of
the Sand Springs Pony Express Station, now an interpretive site run by the
Bureau of Land Management. Despite its endless lore, the Pony Express ran
only from March 1860 until November 1861, when it was driven out of business
by the transcontinental telegraph. Though this quiet way station was later
used as a stagecoach and telegraph outpost, it lay forgotten until being
rediscovered and excavated in 1975.
Modern communications are carried by the rocks along the alkali flats east
of Sand Mountain, where stones have been arranged into messages like "Mike
and Shelley," "I love Sara" and "Jack and Judy," along with a hundred more.
Through the Desatoya and Shoshone Mountains, I drove through endless vistas
until the road dropped into the vast, salty nothingness of the Reese River
Valley. In the distance, the snow-covered peaks of the Toiyabe Range rise to
more than 11,000 feet.
Climbing into the range, I reached another old outpost called Austin. Once a
bustling Pony Express stop, mining center and home to thousands, Austin is
now quaint and tiny, populated by about 250 people. I met a few of them at
the International Cafe & Bar, in the second-oldest hotel building in Nevada.
I asked Jamie Bullington, 24, a high school teacher who was sitting at the
massive hardwood bar, what he thought of Highway 50's "loneliest" tag. "You
know," he said, "sometimes you can stand on the 50 in the middle of town and
not see another car for a half-hour."
That night, I pointed my four-wheel-drive Volkswagen camper up a snowy side
road and found a deserted spot to sleep beneath Orion's belt. The cold sky
was astonishingly clear. Through my windshield, in the weak light from town,
I just made out ski tracks running through the virgin powder on the
expansive, treeless hill across the highway.
From Austin east, the remarkably maintained highway was clear, despite a
landscape blanketed with snow, a reminder of human activity I was all the
happier for when - about 45 minutes outside of Austin - I turned off the
main road to visit the Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area. As the
snow-covered mile-long road to the site steepened I worried that the van
might not make the climb, and stopped to put chains on my rear tires.
Rolling to the parking area, I got out to find that the van had flung off
both improperly fastened snow chains, one of which had wound itself tightly
around my rear axle, threatening to snap the brake line. Heart pounding, and
utterly alone, I said a prayer to the Great Spirit and climbed under the
van. Somehow, I managed to uncoil the chain. Then I hiked along the
petroglyph trail, through a silent forest dense with pinyon pines, and along
a valley pass that is thought to have been a migratory path for antelope - a
perfect spot to set up an ambush for game. That may be what some of the rock
drawings represent - or maybe not. No one knows.
Over the next 80 miles of snowy vastness, I encountered five other cars
before rolling into another beautiful old mining town, Eureka, at lunchtime.
I stopped at the Owl Club Steakhouse, where a friendly cook named Lola
Alanis fixed me a chicken sandwich topped with a mild pepper, a local
specialty. On the wall hung a huge photograph of a hapless antelope that had
tumbled into a ravine and gotten stuck, suspended by its antlers in the
narrow gap. Ms. Alanis said she thought hunters had chased him there. "The
antelope come down in the winter, you know," she said. "They're fearless.
The big ones, too, with the huge antlers. They walk through the middle of
town, and look like princes. You don't see that in the big city."
In 1878, Eureka had a population of 6,500. Today, about 400 people call the
town home. In the offices of the meticulously restored old Eureka Opera
House, I found the caretaker, Patty Peek. After 16 years in town, she was
preparing to move to Reno with her husband, Bob, who had left ahead of her.
"We've been in mining since we've been married," she said. "Every mine we've
been to has shut down. There's no future in it. I'm ready to go somewhere
where there's a 24-hour store."
I asked whether she and her husband would have stayed if the mining work had
been steady. She said probably.
"The thing my husband hates about leaving," she said, "is that you can go
where you want out here. We get people who come in and ask, `Where can you
go and ride motorcycles?' I say anywhere. They say `No, really.' I say
anywhere - anywhere you want to go. You see a gate, and a sign says `Close
the gate,' well, you close the gate behind you."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
___________________________________________
Donald A. Baxter
724 Westgate Street, #1
Iowa City, Iowa 52246
http://www.mindspring.com/~onanov
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