Saturday, September 02, 2006
We arrive in Utah
Two difficult days have gotten us to the Utah border. Thursday evening we were joined by our friends Tom and Judy O'Hare from Bainbridge Island, Washington. Judy bikes with us, and Tom provides support. I'll tell you later about that. Friday was 78 miles from Eureka to Ely. (Eureka bills itself as "the friendliest town on the lonliest road in America.") It was hot (90's) and had 4 mountain passes: Pinto Summit 7351 feet which starts in town; Pancake Summit 6521 feet; Little Antelope Summit 7438 feet; and Robinson Summit 7588 feet. Each had a long downhill and then a steep climb. We all did fine, but were sore and tired at the end of the day. The good news is that Tom drives a camper, carries all our gear, and goes up the road to meet us with water and food.
Today was shorter but much more difficult. We went to the state line because there were no lodgings available anywhere near our destination of Baker, NV. Turns out Baker is the entrance to Big Basin National Park, and the few rooms in the area were all booked in advance by people spending the Labor Day holiday at the park. With Tom driving, we were able to go a little further than planned, and then drive back to our starting point at Ely to spend the night. Tomorrow we will drive back to the state line and set out again.
The difficulty today was Sacramento Pass. It is not particularly high at 7154 feet, but the approach is through an unusually low valley. This is "basin and range" country. There is not one mountain range, but many, and a basin between. That means that every day is a series of long, slow climbs and rapid descents. The typical climb is 700-900 feet, but this one was twice that and steeper than usual as well. We took longer to make the climb, in the heat of the afternoon, and all of us were beat at the top. Then we still had 22 miles to go for the day, although it was mostly downhill.
Several of you have asked for more pictures. My phone is not taking good pictures, but David is taking excellent pictures with his camera. You have seen some of them like the Middlegate shots. We have figured out how to get the pictures from his camera onto this blog, but can't do it from my phone, so we have to wait for a computer. We are taking a rest day in Cedar City on Tuesday, and we hope to give you a grand update complete with David's photographic record of our exploits.
On the culture front, I have a special success to report. The food is mostly found in "casinos" which are bars with slot machines. The food is primarly steak, with mashed potatoes from a box. If you ask for wine, it also comes in a box. In Eureka, at "casino" restaurant, I jokingly told the group that I was going to the bar to get a special selection from the bartender's cellar. I went to the bar and asked if they had "any wine in a bottle." For some reason, unexplained, the bar had a few bottles of excellent wine. I returned to the table with a bottle of Stags Leap Petite Syrah, to general awe.
Here is a contest. Austin, Eureka, and Ely are each 70 or so miles apart. Each was a mining camp. They are each at about 6400 feet elevation, separated by several ranges and basins. I have a guess that it is not a coincidence that they are all at the same elevation; that there must have been a single ancient deposit of ore which remained after all the earth's moving around. One of you readers must know the explanation, or can find it. I would like to provide a real scientific lesson to our readers, so the best explanation will recieve special recognition.
We have traveled 636 miles from San Francisco to Utah in 9 days, all under our own power. We have had lots of help from lots of people, but we are also enjoying the satisfaction of doing something very difficult. We are sore, but we think we are getting stronger as we get aclimated to the altitude. (We have not been below 4000 feet since the afternoon after we left San Francisco. I am enjoying sharing this trip with you, and will continue to try to improve our technical skills to bring you faster and more pictorial reporting.
Today was shorter but much more difficult. We went to the state line because there were no lodgings available anywhere near our destination of Baker, NV. Turns out Baker is the entrance to Big Basin National Park, and the few rooms in the area were all booked in advance by people spending the Labor Day holiday at the park. With Tom driving, we were able to go a little further than planned, and then drive back to our starting point at Ely to spend the night. Tomorrow we will drive back to the state line and set out again.
The difficulty today was Sacramento Pass. It is not particularly high at 7154 feet, but the approach is through an unusually low valley. This is "basin and range" country. There is not one mountain range, but many, and a basin between. That means that every day is a series of long, slow climbs and rapid descents. The typical climb is 700-900 feet, but this one was twice that and steeper than usual as well. We took longer to make the climb, in the heat of the afternoon, and all of us were beat at the top. Then we still had 22 miles to go for the day, although it was mostly downhill.
Several of you have asked for more pictures. My phone is not taking good pictures, but David is taking excellent pictures with his camera. You have seen some of them like the Middlegate shots. We have figured out how to get the pictures from his camera onto this blog, but can't do it from my phone, so we have to wait for a computer. We are taking a rest day in Cedar City on Tuesday, and we hope to give you a grand update complete with David's photographic record of our exploits.
On the culture front, I have a special success to report. The food is mostly found in "casinos" which are bars with slot machines. The food is primarly steak, with mashed potatoes from a box. If you ask for wine, it also comes in a box. In Eureka, at "casino" restaurant, I jokingly told the group that I was going to the bar to get a special selection from the bartender's cellar. I went to the bar and asked if they had "any wine in a bottle." For some reason, unexplained, the bar had a few bottles of excellent wine. I returned to the table with a bottle of Stags Leap Petite Syrah, to general awe.
Here is a contest. Austin, Eureka, and Ely are each 70 or so miles apart. Each was a mining camp. They are each at about 6400 feet elevation, separated by several ranges and basins. I have a guess that it is not a coincidence that they are all at the same elevation; that there must have been a single ancient deposit of ore which remained after all the earth's moving around. One of you readers must know the explanation, or can find it. I would like to provide a real scientific lesson to our readers, so the best explanation will recieve special recognition.
We have traveled 636 miles from San Francisco to Utah in 9 days, all under our own power. We have had lots of help from lots of people, but we are also enjoying the satisfaction of doing something very difficult. We are sore, but we think we are getting stronger as we get aclimated to the altitude. (We have not been below 4000 feet since the afternoon after we left San Francisco. I am enjoying sharing this trip with you, and will continue to try to improve our technical skills to bring you faster and more pictorial reporting.
Comments:
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Happy birthday Grandma Judy!!! Loves and kisses Ken, Sandy, Logan Darby and Newman O'Hare.
Oh yay - your dog Seamus is giving a big garbage mouthful of kisses your way as well.
Oh yay - your dog Seamus is giving a big garbage mouthful of kisses your way as well.
# posted by 
: Sunday, September 03, 2006 10:38:00 AM
: Sunday, September 03, 2006 10:38:00 AM
Happy Birthday to Judy !
What an adventure! If I still lived in Toledo, I'd come to cheer you "home". I look forward to reading your posts. Prayers for continued safe travel.
"the girl next door"
What an adventure! If I still lived in Toledo, I'd come to cheer you "home". I look forward to reading your posts. Prayers for continued safe travel.
"the girl next door"
# posted by : Sunday, September 03, 2006 12:00:00 PM
: Sunday, September 03, 2006 12:00:00 PM
Jeff,
Your challenge led me to my bookshelf for John McPhee's "Basin and Range" (1981). McPhee travelled back and forth across the country (Hwy 80) with various geologists, notably Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton geology professor and sometime silver miner, to learn about the then new and revolutionary theory of plate tectonics. Deffeyes believes a seaway eventually will open up and the spreading center will be roughly "through the axis of Death Valley and up into Nevada, and then north by northwest through Basalt and Coaldale before bending due north through Walker Lake, Fallon, and Lovelock. 'The spreading center would connect with a transform fault coming in from Cape Mendocino,' he adds, and he sketches a such a line from the California coast to a point a little north of Lovelock. He is sketching the creation of a crustal plate, and he seems confident of that edge, for the Mendocino transform fault--the Mendocino trend--is in place now, ready to go. He is less certain about the southern edge of the new plate, because he has two choices. . . . 'The sea has got to get through somewhere.'
"Now he places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California--from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno--not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada.'
...
"Meanwhile, Deffeyes, in Sturgeon's Log Cabin [diner in Lovelock] applies the last refining strokes to his sketchings on the map. "The Salton Sea and Death Valley are below sea level now, and the ocean would be there if it were not for pieces of this and that between,' he says. 'We are extending the continental crust here. It is exactly analogous to the East African Rift, the Red Sea, the Atlantic. California will be an island. It is just a matter of time.'"
Not the answer to your query, but certainly humbling to contemplate geologic time. Here is more of Deffeyes:
"'I was in a bar once in Austin, Nevada . . . and there was a sudden torrential downpour. The bartender began nailing plywood over the door. I wondered why he was doing that, until boulders came tumbling down the main street of the town. When you start pulling a continent apart, you have a lot of consequences of the same event. Faulting produced this basin. . . . in the West, in the Basin and Range. The earth is splitting apart there, quite possibly opening a seaway. It is not something that happened a couple of hundred million years ago. It only began in the Miocene, and it is going on today. . . . You can see it all in Nevada.'"
The following section is just pretty--makes me want to be there:
"Basin. Fault. Range. Basin. Fault. Range. A mile of relief between basin and range. Stillwater Range. Pleasant Valley. Tobin Range. Jersey Valley. Sonoma Range. Pumpernickel Valley. Shoshone Range. Reese River Valley. Pequop Mountains. Steptoe Valley. Ondographic rhythms of the Basin and Range. We are maybe forty miles off the interstate in the Pleasant Valley basin, looking up at the Tobin Range. At the nine-thousand-foot level, there is a stratum of cloud against the shoulders of the mountains, hanging like a ring of Saturn. . . . Junipers in the mountains were thickly hung with berries, and the air was unadulterated gin. This country from afar is synopsized and dismissed as 'desert'--the home of the coyote and pocket mouse, the side-blotched lizard and the vagrant shrew, the MX rocket and the pallid bat. There are minks and river otters in the Basin and Range. There are deer and antelope, porcupines and cougars, pelicans, cormorants, and common loons. There are Bonaparte's gulls and marbled godwits, American coots and Virginia rails. Pheasants. Grouse. Sandhill cranes. Ferruginous hawks and flammulated owls. Snow geese. This Nevada terrain is not corrugated, like the folded Applachians, like a tubal air mattress, like a rippled potato chip. This is not--in that compressive manner--a ridge-and-valley situation. Each range here is like a warship standing on its own, and the Great Basin is an ocean of loose sediment with these mountain ranges standing in it as if they were members of a fleet without precedent, assembled at Guam to assault Japan. Some of the ranges are forty miles long, others a hundred, a hundred and fifty. They point generally north. The basins that separate them--ten and fifteen miles wide--will run on for fifty, a hundred, two hundred and fifty miles with lone, daisy-petalled windmills standing over sage and wild rye. Animals tend to be content with their home ranges and not to venture out across the big dry valleys. 'Imagine a chipmunk hiking across one of these basins', Deffeyes remarks. 'The faunas in the high ranges are quite distinct from one to another. Animals are isolated like Darwin's finches in the Galapagos. These ranges are truly islands.'
"Supreme over all is silence. Discounting the cry of the occasional bird, the wailing of a pack of coyotes, silence--a great spatial silence--is pure in the Basin and Range. It is a soundless immensity with mountains in it."
It must have been grand moving through all that on your silent wheels.
--Cindy
Your challenge led me to my bookshelf for John McPhee's "Basin and Range" (1981). McPhee travelled back and forth across the country (Hwy 80) with various geologists, notably Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton geology professor and sometime silver miner, to learn about the then new and revolutionary theory of plate tectonics. Deffeyes believes a seaway eventually will open up and the spreading center will be roughly "through the axis of Death Valley and up into Nevada, and then north by northwest through Basalt and Coaldale before bending due north through Walker Lake, Fallon, and Lovelock. 'The spreading center would connect with a transform fault coming in from Cape Mendocino,' he adds, and he sketches a such a line from the California coast to a point a little north of Lovelock. He is sketching the creation of a crustal plate, and he seems confident of that edge, for the Mendocino transform fault--the Mendocino trend--is in place now, ready to go. He is less certain about the southern edge of the new plate, because he has two choices. . . . 'The sea has got to get through somewhere.'
"Now he places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California--from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno--not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada.'
...
"Meanwhile, Deffeyes, in Sturgeon's Log Cabin [diner in Lovelock] applies the last refining strokes to his sketchings on the map. "The Salton Sea and Death Valley are below sea level now, and the ocean would be there if it were not for pieces of this and that between,' he says. 'We are extending the continental crust here. It is exactly analogous to the East African Rift, the Red Sea, the Atlantic. California will be an island. It is just a matter of time.'"
Not the answer to your query, but certainly humbling to contemplate geologic time. Here is more of Deffeyes:
"'I was in a bar once in Austin, Nevada . . . and there was a sudden torrential downpour. The bartender began nailing plywood over the door. I wondered why he was doing that, until boulders came tumbling down the main street of the town. When you start pulling a continent apart, you have a lot of consequences of the same event. Faulting produced this basin. . . . in the West, in the Basin and Range. The earth is splitting apart there, quite possibly opening a seaway. It is not something that happened a couple of hundred million years ago. It only began in the Miocene, and it is going on today. . . . You can see it all in Nevada.'"
The following section is just pretty--makes me want to be there:
"Basin. Fault. Range. Basin. Fault. Range. A mile of relief between basin and range. Stillwater Range. Pleasant Valley. Tobin Range. Jersey Valley. Sonoma Range. Pumpernickel Valley. Shoshone Range. Reese River Valley. Pequop Mountains. Steptoe Valley. Ondographic rhythms of the Basin and Range. We are maybe forty miles off the interstate in the Pleasant Valley basin, looking up at the Tobin Range. At the nine-thousand-foot level, there is a stratum of cloud against the shoulders of the mountains, hanging like a ring of Saturn. . . . Junipers in the mountains were thickly hung with berries, and the air was unadulterated gin. This country from afar is synopsized and dismissed as 'desert'--the home of the coyote and pocket mouse, the side-blotched lizard and the vagrant shrew, the MX rocket and the pallid bat. There are minks and river otters in the Basin and Range. There are deer and antelope, porcupines and cougars, pelicans, cormorants, and common loons. There are Bonaparte's gulls and marbled godwits, American coots and Virginia rails. Pheasants. Grouse. Sandhill cranes. Ferruginous hawks and flammulated owls. Snow geese. This Nevada terrain is not corrugated, like the folded Applachians, like a tubal air mattress, like a rippled potato chip. This is not--in that compressive manner--a ridge-and-valley situation. Each range here is like a warship standing on its own, and the Great Basin is an ocean of loose sediment with these mountain ranges standing in it as if they were members of a fleet without precedent, assembled at Guam to assault Japan. Some of the ranges are forty miles long, others a hundred, a hundred and fifty. They point generally north. The basins that separate them--ten and fifteen miles wide--will run on for fifty, a hundred, two hundred and fifty miles with lone, daisy-petalled windmills standing over sage and wild rye. Animals tend to be content with their home ranges and not to venture out across the big dry valleys. 'Imagine a chipmunk hiking across one of these basins', Deffeyes remarks. 'The faunas in the high ranges are quite distinct from one to another. Animals are isolated like Darwin's finches in the Galapagos. These ranges are truly islands.'
"Supreme over all is silence. Discounting the cry of the occasional bird, the wailing of a pack of coyotes, silence--a great spatial silence--is pure in the Basin and Range. It is a soundless immensity with mountains in it."
It must have been grand moving through all that on your silent wheels.
--Cindy
# posted by : Sunday, September 03, 2006 5:24:00 PM
: Sunday, September 03, 2006 5:24:00 PM
Jeff,
This is Helen Bogner, Cindy's roommate. I love maps and have been following your trip. I am originally from Bishop and greatgrandparents were miners in Nevada, esp.. Tonapah so I am familiar with the wind and heat. I have a bunch of relatives in the Austin cemetary. The first had come around the horn and worked for the Pony Express a bit, than mined and ranched in the area. A couple of years ago Cindy and I went on a trip to Bishop them over to Nev. on small roads to Goldfield and Tonapah, then up to Austin. I stupidly didn't fill up the gas tank thinking I would be fine to get to Fallon. In the middle of the singing sands and Salt Wells the car started yapping at me that I had no more gas. As you know the road is two lane, filled with truckers going fast and the drop off on each side seemed to me to be acute. I had no idea if I ran out of gas and had to leave the road if the (rental) car would flip. So, when the first signs of Fallon appeared - flattened out roadside and gas station - I said Whew, and Fallon will always be a beautiful sight.
Am enjoying your trip.
Helen
This is Helen Bogner, Cindy's roommate. I love maps and have been following your trip. I am originally from Bishop and greatgrandparents were miners in Nevada, esp.. Tonapah so I am familiar with the wind and heat. I have a bunch of relatives in the Austin cemetary. The first had come around the horn and worked for the Pony Express a bit, than mined and ranched in the area. A couple of years ago Cindy and I went on a trip to Bishop them over to Nev. on small roads to Goldfield and Tonapah, then up to Austin. I stupidly didn't fill up the gas tank thinking I would be fine to get to Fallon. In the middle of the singing sands and Salt Wells the car started yapping at me that I had no more gas. As you know the road is two lane, filled with truckers going fast and the drop off on each side seemed to me to be acute. I had no idea if I ran out of gas and had to leave the road if the (rental) car would flip. So, when the first signs of Fallon appeared - flattened out roadside and gas station - I said Whew, and Fallon will always be a beautiful sight.
Am enjoying your trip.
Helen
# posted by : Sunday, September 03, 2006 9:10:00 PM
: Sunday, September 03, 2006 9:10:00 PM
Jeff -
Pete and I have traveled 50 over the years on our way to Durango. We know all of those passes (some with cut backs) and how they descend into the basins below. You got our appreciation! Also we stayed one night at the bed and breakfast in Baker(if it's still there) and went through the Lehman caves the next day.
We're enjoying your ride!!!
Sue
Pete and I have traveled 50 over the years on our way to Durango. We know all of those passes (some with cut backs) and how they descend into the basins below. You got our appreciation! Also we stayed one night at the bed and breakfast in Baker(if it's still there) and went through the Lehman caves the next day.
We're enjoying your ride!!!
Sue
# posted by : Monday, September 04, 2006 12:39:00 PM
: Monday, September 04, 2006 12:39:00 PM
Not only are you getting stronger, but your gift for blog is getting near syndication level. It's a great read Jeff. You're making all this up though aren't you?
I'm looking forward to the bounty of pictures coming after tomorrow. I'm still marveling at the courage, strenth and heart of you and your merry men.
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I'm looking forward to the bounty of pictures coming after tomorrow. I'm still marveling at the courage, strenth and heart of you and your merry men.
# posted by : Monday, September 04, 2006 6:01:00 PM
: Monday, September 04, 2006 6:01:00 PM << Home
