Nevada - Day 20 - Valley of Fire, to Alamo

Picketts RV Park, Alamo

Wednesday, 20 April 2022

today's route

Google said today's drive would take almost 3½ hours, which meant to me a likely trip of at least 6 hours, so we left before 8:00.

While I was waiting for the first traffic light to turn green, I saw a young woman cross the street in front of traffic that had a green light - including a large truck and a bus.  She seemed completely oblivious to them, despite being lucky not to be killed, and was singing or talking or something the whole time I saw her.  I'm guessing she was on drugs, but it wasn't a safe kind of drug, given her seriously dangerous behavior.

You can see from the map that the whole first part of the drive paralleled the shore of Lake Mead, much farther north than I was the other day.  You may also be able to see that the road parallels the route of the Old Spanish Trail.  I saw an exhibit about it that I thought was interesting.

This is what the whole sign looked like,
and below are enlarged versions of parts of it.

This is the land they were traveling through at this point.

The Old Spanish Trail was one of the most popular and one of the most dangerous of all the trade routes through the US.  This section, though not plagued so much by canyons and roaring river crossings, was - after all - desert country.

It was already so warm today that I was wearing a tank top and had the air conditioner on, and I heard on the radio that it was 35° in Elko, where I plan to be in a couple of days.  Whiplash.

The road took us through mountains of jagged rock in shades of brown and rusty red, with large dirt mounds on the ground in front.

We turned into the Valley of Fire State Park, which was Nevada's first (since the 1930s) and is its largest state park (more than 40,000 acres).  I guess the area was named for the amazing red rocks found throughout the area.  

They're made of red sandstone and were created from the sand dunes that existed here 150 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  During the intervening years, those sand dunes solidified, I guess.  The area was once covered by sea, and petrified logs in the park attest to forests also being here.  Imagine what it must have looked like then - sea, forests, sand dunes.  Today we've got desert.  Life is truly amazing.

There was an unstaffed booth at the entrance and a sign saying non-NV residents needed to pay $15.  There was another sign saying the credit card machine was broken and I should stop at the visitor center.  There was no sign saying where the visitor center was, and there were no maps available.  There was, however, another sign saying they'd charge a $25 fine if I didn't pay.  And I thought, how would they know if they don't staff their entrances.

I'll just finish that story by saying that the visitor center turned out to be about halfway through the park, except there weren't any signs saying something like "visitor center in ¼ mile".  So I happened to be passing a bicyclist at exactly the point where I should have turned to go to the visitor center.  And there were zero places where I could turn around anywhere for miles from there.  

But I got lucky (?) and found the exit station was staffed.  Maybe they get more traffic coming into that entrance so they've put someone there, and didn't bother with the other one.  I mentioned the situation to the nice young ranger when I paid my entrance fee, and she said having more signs was a great idea but their budget couldn't afford them until the next fiscal year.  I tried.

Anyway, back to the park.  As we came into the area, we passed a sign saying "Watch for Wildlife."  Then, at the unstaffed entrance where I'd intended to let the dogs out for a walk, we were stymied by this guy.

Actually, I think it's a gal - a female Bighorn Sheep.

But she showed no signs of moving on, so I couldn't let my dogs out, and we went on down the road looking for a place to rest.  Remember, at Lake Mead I'd seen a male Bighorn Sheep immediately after I'd seen a warning sign to watch for them.  Maybe the sheep can read these signs?

By accident I noticed that a very large rock had a small parking area beside it and quickly turned in.  The rock was called Lone Rock, and that's just what it was.

This photo shows just part of one side; I've lived in apartments smaller than this rock.  It wasn't completely solid and included several holes.

I'd hoped this photo would show the critter that I thought was a chipmunk that ran into this hole when the dogs got out of the RV.  I've blown it up as far as I could and I think I can see it in there, but it's just not as clear as I'd hoped.  Anyway, the park said it was a White-tailed Antelope Ground Squirrel.

White-tailed Antelope Ground Squirrel
(but it looks like a chipmunk to me)

This deep whorl in Lone Rock was higher than my head.  It'd make a challenging jigsaw puzzle.

Farther along the park road we came to an area with what the park called Beehives.

The park's brochure (that I got from the ranger at the exit) said these are "examples of geologic cross-bedding" like that's supposed to mean something to me.  So I looked it up and learned that "geologic cross bedding" means the grooved lines you can see.  They're going in different directions and represent different layers of silt that were deposited at different times.  The different directions show the angle that the wind or water was moving at the time each layer of silt got deposited.

At that same area I saw a sign that answered a question I'd had.

 I'd been seeing a lot of things that I assume now were wind holes.

With so many holes, they look like organ pipes.

And now I know where they came from.

And one more photo. 

Red rocks, wind holes and cross bedding: it's the whole bag of tricks.

I'd seen several ranges that looked like regular mountains but take a look at the half-hidden red rocks in them.

But as the road climbed out of the valley (making it clear we were in a valley) the view suddenly became very bland.  Creamy tan hills.  Nothing wrong with them but certainly not as eye-catching as vibrant red rocks.

During the rest of the drive, I passed 2 areas where I'm sure I saw large bodies of water at a bit of a distance from the road.  But according to the AAA map, one of them was "Fike Dry Lake" and the other was "Desert Lake (Dry)."  I really wouldn't have thought it was the kind of weather that would show me that fake water you see on roadways on hot days.  And these weren't on a road but instead off into dry land.  Still, I have heard of mirages.  But 2 of them?

And along those lines, we were all ready for another break but hadn't seen a rest area for miles.  Finally, when I turned from I-15 onto US-93, I saw this strange little oasis with brilliant green fields for baseball and for a dog park.  Everything else around it was wide flat tan parking area across the street from a gas station.  No town anywhere around as far as I could tell.  So we stopped and I let the dogs into the small fenced dog park for a few minutes.  We had some lunch and then got back on the road.

We passed a VAST solar field, followed by the Chuck Lenzie Power Plant and the Silverhawk Power Plant.  So of course I figured those plants were using that solar power.  But they weren't.  I looked them both up and learned that they're both gas-fueled power plants.  Weird, isn't it?

On NPR I heard an interview with Glenn Boozan who wrote, There Are Moms Way Worse Than You.  This woman is hilarious and it sounds like the book is a must-have for every parent who worries they aren't doing a good enough job.  Or as she told her sister, pregnant with her 2nd child and worried that she wasn't doing right by her first, "Hamster moms eat their babies."  Here's a link to the interview and a sample of the book.   https://knpr.org/there-are-moms-way-worse-than-you

I saw a Montana license plate that said: LIV2FSH.  No translation needed here.

The map said the whole area we passed on our left was the Desert National Wildlife Refuge.  What I saw was the broad valley we drove through, sandwiched between mountain ranges, and covered with Joshua trees and other yuccas and desert plants.

We crossed into Lincoln County and I mention it only because I saw an electronic sign touting Lincoln County, including moving pictures, and it was out in the middle of absolutely nothing.  I don't even know where the electricity came from.

Nevada has a town called Elgin (as some other states do), and a sign told me I could go there if I drove for 38 miles down a dirt road on the right.

I passed 3 separated signs warning of a "Major Deer Crossing."  One of them had flashing lights.  I saw no deer at all.  Clearly, they can't read highway signs as well as Bighorn Sheep can.

Farther along I saw a couple of lakes that were actual lakes - according to both AAA and highway signs.  Upper and Lower Pahranagat Valley Lakes.  They were in the Pahranagat Valley, which was in the Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge near the Pahranagat Range.  I have no idea where such an unusual name came from.

As we neared Alamo, we started to see a whole lot of green fields - both grass for cows and horses and also crops.  Given the relentless surrounding desert, I'm guessing irrigation is big around here.

Alamo, elevation 3,450', and a 2020 population of 1,128, says it's named for the abundant poplars in the area.  But I learned in New Mexico that "alamo" is the Spanish word for cottonwood.  And it was cottonwood that I saw a whole lot of here.  

At tonight's campground it was inches deep in the cotton from the trees that shaded the campsites.  I'd've thought Nevada was a state that could translate Spanish as well as those New Mexicans, so I looked up the words and found that they're both species in the genus Populus.  And I sure could've been wrong but I can't imagine I was wading through cotton from anything but a cottonwood tree.  It got into everything, including getting stuck in the pads of the dogs' feet when we went out for walks.  I had to pick it out tuft by tuft.