Through the Rockies and into Nevada

Waking up at the campsite was interesting this morning. It was a lot colder than I thought it would be, which was a nice change of pace from waking up in a sweaty tent.

Some furry friends saw us off in the morning

I got a few shots of the local birdlife and we headed out of the mountains – only to head back into the mountains as we went from Colorado into Utah. There are a slew of words I could use to describe the experience of driving through the Rocky Mountains but all I will say is the photos we took do not do it justice.

These are just a few of the 200 pictures we took while driving through the Rocky Mountains

After passing through the Rockies and into Utah we found ourselves in desert. Lots of desert. With Nebraska, all there was to look at was corn. In this section of Utah all there are to look at are plateaus and mesas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the whole time I had this fear of being stranded on the side of the road with an overheated car. There are hardly any rest areas. In fact, 98% of the time it was just us and the desert.

Eventually we made it out of the basin and into – another basin. The nice thing about this one is within is contained the Great Salt Lake (which, as it turns out, doesn’t smell very good) and its surrounding civilization. We opted not to stop in Salt Lake City and instead decided to get as far into Nevada as we could by sundown, as we have to be in San Francisco tomorrow.

As we headed toward Nevada we had nothing but flatlands on either side of us. For a very long time. In fact, all of Utah from Salt Lake City to the state line is one big salt flat. Jaimie was driving and I was looking up things about where we were on my phone. I decided to see where the Bonneville Salt Flats were. When I put it into my phone the little pushpin ended up right next to our location. I looked up and, lo and behold, there was a sea of white all around us. Of course, we had to get out and take pictures. As much as I wanted to, we didn’t take the car out. The salt is sticky and clumpy and after walking a few feet onto the lakebed, there was a thick layer of damp salt on the bottoms of our shoes. I can imagine what driving through that would have done to my car.

After a short while we made it into Nevada. We proceeded through some more mountains and here we find ourselves surrounded by more nothing. The plan was to camp somewhere outside Elko, NV tonight. Unfortunately, the forecast calls for thunderstorms with cloud to ground lightning and possible fire starts, so we will be checking into our first motel.  Better to be safe than a statistic.