The road materializes as you drive on it.
It’s been a long couple of weeks for the Gallivanting Explorer. I just got back from the Four Corners area of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, where I explored Anasazi cliff dwellings on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Reservation, went rafting through the Navajo Reservation, on the San Juan River – all under the guidance of archaeologists, who provided more information than I could ever hope to retain. It was great!
Not so great. Driving the long road from San Francisco to Cortez, Colorado and back. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was driving The Loneliest Road in America….
This is what it looks like, seemingly forever
But sometimes it looks like this…
Another car! Another car!
The road was given that name in 1987 in a Life magazine article, and it’s specifically about the stretch the highway makes when it goes through Nevada. Nevada is empty. If it’s not in Las Vegas or Reno, it’s either a ghost town or a bombing range or a desert. With the heat waves beating off the razor-straight road, it sometimes appears as if the road is being rendered as one is driving on it.
The road materializes as you drive on it.
There are some highlights, though they are few and way too far between. Take for example, the shoe tree.
It’s a tree made out of shoes!
This shoe tree is growing on the long road between Delta, Utah and Ely, Nevada. I don’t know if these shoes fell from the sky, came from cannibalized corpses, or were thrown up there on a crazy lark by small town rebels, like a scene out of Footloose. (“Hey fellas! After we finish up with these malted drinks, let’s drive seventy four miles and toss our shoes up into a tree!”) All I know is, the road is so mind-numbingly desolate, flat, and uninteresting that I felt it worth stopping for.
Also worth stopping for is this little art piece.
I’m guessing these antlers weren’t given up voluntarily
Yep. That there is what I have dubbed the Antler Arch. I don’t know what else to call it. I’m guessing whoever lives there is a fan of venison. Or he’s some sort of deer slayer. I bet deer look at it and have instant heart attacks. I’m here to tell you that this house, whoever lives there, is about sixty miles away from what is essentially a ghost town with a couple of casinos. If you were a lunatic, and actively insane, this would be a good place to live. You’d have to be insane to live there and living there would make you go insane. So, by the rules of logic, which I got a D in twenty years ago, there’s a 100% chance a crazy person lives on the other side of those antlers.
After a long day of driving, listening to Merle Haggard and eating beef jerky, I got to the aforementioned shithole of Ely, Nevada. As bad as it is, for Nevada it’s an oasis. Almost anyone driving highway 50, going one way or the other stops here. It’s a depressing place and also really hard to find a place to sleep. I ended up a place called the Jailhouse Motel – which sounds nicer than it is.
Don’t let the sparkly lights fool you. This place is a real dump.
Notice the lack of a “sanitized” ribbon. Notice the wear and tear.
Hmmm. These pictures don’t do the place justice. But if you zoom in, I think you will appreciate the well-worn, let us say haggard, bathroom. It’s hard not to see that bathroom and not picture decades of morbidly obese long-haul truckers sitting there pondering their biscuits and gravy diet.
I got up early the next morning. It was thirty five degrees out and three hours later it was 92 and rising steadily. Even the weather sucks in Nevada. Heading west out of Ely, I found myself on the Pony Express Trail. I drove through Eureka, Nevada, and passed by a post office where the Pony Express used to drop off really long, horribly misspelled missives from buffalo hunters to favored whores.
The next town after Eureka is Austin, Nevada, which is essentially a giant cemetery of dead cars and trucks. Its the perfect setting for a horror movie full of hillbilly cannibals.
What happens in Austin, Nevada stays in Austin, Nevada! Including you!
Then, beyond that, for a long stretch, there’s only two things to do. Stop occasionally and look at sand dunes and pictographs; and watch the navy bomb large swathes of sand.
Grimes Point has some really old graffiti
A giant mountain of sand! And RV people. This was as close as I got.
Navy:1 – Sand: 0
The next big town, and by big I’m speaking relative to no town, is Fallon, where all the Navy people live when they aren’t kicking the crap out of a bunch of sand. Then, an hour later, you get to the capital of Nevada, Carson City, home of Johnny Carson. Carson City is, for a capital city, pretty much a searingly hot hellhole. The whole town feels like the sketchy part of almost any other town. Sphincter shrinking bordellos, casinos full of aging zombies, bikers and meth heads.
Then it gets nice. You climb up into the mountains and before you know it you’re in South Lake Tahoe, which is probably as nice as Nevada gets. The air is cooler, there are more trees, and the stunningly blue, larger than expected, Lake Tahoe. I’d share a picture, but the road was really windy, and every time I tried to take one I would find myself either on the opposite side of the road about to be rammed by a tractor trailer or about to plunge off a cliff.
At some point, even though there’s no big Welcome To California! sign, you cross the border. And, almost immediately, for whatever reason, the competency of the drivers immediately plunges. It’s a dramatic decline, and very noticeable. You find yourself being tailgated by some twenty something on their iPad or having some speed freak race around you, almost sideswiping you in the process, only to pull over to the side of the road, immediately giving up their so fiercely gained progress. I don’t know if it’s because the cell networks improve or what, but it’s impressive, I’ll just say that.
San Francisco is not an easy city to drive in, or ride a bike in, or walk in, or do much of anything in really. You live in the city for any length of time and you will either get run over by a car, smacked into by a bicycle or impaled by an irate cab driver. Coming off of The Loneliest Road in America into San Francisco is not for the faint of heart. By the time my journey was done, and I’d killed my last flying insect with my windshield, I was a quivering mess.
Now, the car is in the garage, the engine is off, and, if I can help it, I’m walking everywhere.
