Nevada - Day 25 - to Elko and Austin

Austin Baptist Church and RV Park, Austin

Monday, 25 April 2022

today's route

I joined I-80 in West Wendover and took it about 2/3 of today's distance.  Not far from West Wendover, I saw 2 mining operations (I guess - no signs but that's what they looked like).  The first looked like they were taking apart a mountain.  The second, about 20 miles down the road, was exposing red rock:

In between the two operations, I went over Silverzone Pass, 5,940', and saw what I think was Pilot Peak on the right.  Its height is 5,276', which is lower than the pass, but it's an actual mountain standing by itself.

A pickup truck had a Nevada license plate that read: LILBKRU.  I'm assuming that's Little Buckaroo?  Cute.

The road took me across a broad plain of desert land with mountain ranges all around.

A sign with a flashing light warned me of a major deer crossing for the next 11 miles.  I really did keep an eye out, and figured in this countryside it shouldn't be all that hard to spot a deer.  But they just didn't show up.

Next came Pequop Summit, elev. 6,967', followed by the town of Wells.  Somewhere after that summit I started seeing a large, long, broad-shouldered mountain range that had heavy snow about 1/3 of the way down its sides.  It seemed to begin its north/south run at Wells, so I continued to see it as I drove on to Elko.  I saw that the range was longer than I'd thought, and on its west side the snow was even thicker and extended 2/3 of the way down its sides.  (That's the rain shadow effect, I guess.)  The map told me I was seeing the East Humboldt Range, which includes Hole In The Mountain Peak, at 11,286'.

On the other side of the highway, I saw the trailer part of a tractor-trailer that was completely burned with the highway side gone entirely and the contents also incinerated.  That must have been a scary mess for the semi driver.

I guessed that I came into Elko, though there was no highway sign, but it was where I thought it should be.  There were 20,564 residents here in 2020, so it's much the biggest place in this section of the state.  We stopped at a park to take a walk, and I saw a sign saying it was "Homeland of the National Basque Festival" on the July 4th weekend.  I'd heard that many Basque had settled in Nevada, and I think it's great that they're keeping traditions alive.

In the park I saw lots of birds' eggs smashed at the bases of trees.  I saw another area that was covered with colored glass - like Christmas balls - that had been crushed and scattered.  I wondered if they'd had a major storm here - maybe that ugly thing that attacked me via the sandstorm near Tonopah.  And it was high winds that had knocked the birds' eggs out of the trees.  And maybe they'd been decorating the park for Easter and that's where the colored glass came from.  Just a guess.

They have artists in town.

These were on a small building in the park.

I ran into traffic problems trying to leave the gas station across the street, went around a few blocks, and found the Northeastern Nevada Museum.

This is the side of the museum.

Looks like it might be worth a visit when I have more time.

Leaving town I passed the California Trail Interpretive Center.  A nice-looking building but I saw no cars at all, even for staff.  Maybe it's closed on Mondays in the off-season.

Down the road I came to a tunnel I hadn't expected.  It wasn't a bad tunnel - flat, well-lighted, with decent lane sizes, and only a third of a mile long - but there was something strange about it because the pressure inside was so intense it hurt my ears.  I've never had that happen before in any tunnel, let alone a flat one that wasn't under water.

Near the tunnel was the small town of Carlin, pop. 2,277 in 2020, where I saw a sign: "Where The Trains Stop and The Gold Rush Begins."

Past there I-80 started to be a collection of steep hills up and steep grades down.  Plus a strong crosswind kept pushing me onto the bumps at the right edge of the lane and driving me crazy.  Bzzz.  Bzzz.  Over and over.

There was no sign telling me I was in Battle Mountain, a county seat though it's unincorporated.  One website told me it was a ghost town, but 3,705 residents seem too many for a ghost town.  It sits at 4,514'.  It was there that I turned south on NV-305, that AAA said is a scenic route, to head to Austin.

I wondered, during the 87-mile drive south, why AAA would say this was a scenic area.  I'll give you 2 samples of what I saw and you can decide.

I lightened this photo so you could see some detail
(what there is of it), but the sky was actually as
darkly overcast as in the other photo.

I think I took this trying to show that area of sand
stuck out in the middle of all those scrubby bushes.

I saw only 2 things of real note (relatively speaking) on this drive.  One was an area of purple fields, though at first I thought it was a trick of the light that made me think that brown fields were purple.  Then we stopped at the Valley of the Moon Rest Area (I have no idea why it's called that, unless they were suggesting it was as bleak as the moon's surface, which it only kind of was), where I could see the purple flowers close up.

This purple field was directly across the highway:

This may seem like I was hard up for something scenic, and I was.  

The other notable thing wasn't exactly scenic, though I saw them.

I passed at least 4 huge bird's nests on utility poles alongside the road.  At first I thought they were on platforms that had been built to encourage the birds to nest, but when I looked as closely as I could while driving down the road (no place to stop and no shoulder at all), I couldn't see a platform, only a nest.

I saw birds actually sitting on two nests, another just getting off a nest and flying away, and a fourth nest that didn't seem to have anybody on it.  At first I thought they were Peregrine Falcons, because they seemed to be about the right size and coloring - though I'll agree the overcast day and my driving speed weren't the best bird-watching conditions.  But the bird book says Peregrines only migrate through Nevada, not nest here - especially not in the northcentral part of the state.

My other guesses for size and coloring that might actually nest here would be Ferruginous Hawk and Northern Harrier.  I'm sure someone from Nevada's Fish and Game office could tell me what they were.  But whatever the species, it was really neat to see them nesting there.  And looking for their nests gave me something to do on an otherwise pretty boring piece of road.

I began to see the end of a mountain range ahead, and these too were covered in heavy snow.  Little did I know that Austin, where I was headed, was actually built on the side of part of that range.  The map told me it was the Toiyabe Mountains, and they seem to run for quite a distance.  One mountain in that range, labeled Arc Dome, is 11,778' high.

The road crossed the "Pony Express Trail 1860 - 1861," according to a sign.

And we came into Austin, elev. 6,575'.  The 2020 census said there were 113 residents, which was nearly half the 2010 population of 192.  There just didn't seem to be much going on there, though there was a nice little (tiny) old downtown area, and there were several churches.

The nice lady I talked to on the phone, who was in charge of the RV park the local Baptist church operated, told me to turn on either East St. or 3rd St., depending on which Google had labeled it.  Now I've had plenty of experience with Google's directions and know for a fact that they sometimes call a street by a name that absolutely nobody else calls it and that doesn't appear on any signs (but only in Google's directions).  So Google told me to turn on East St., but when I came to 3rd St. at about the place Google said I'd find East St., I turned on 3rd.  As it happened, Google was right about the East St. part and wrong about the mileage I'd need to get there.

3rd St. went almost straight uphill, where I found nothing but a few houses and a woman walking 2 bouncy dogs and a government vehicle that wanted to turn on 3rd St. but were waiting for me to finish the climb.  (If you've ever driven in San Francisco, it was like that - straight up, then level off for a cross street, then continue with straight up.)  Well, I couldn't ask for directions of the woman with the dogs because I figured between Dexter and her curious dogs we'd have an incident.  So I tried to flag down the govt. truck (they thought I was just waving cheerfully until I looked desperate - because I was waiting at a steep angle trying to figure out where to go), and asked for directions.  They said turn right and go until I run into the RV park.  And they were right.  That was where East St. was.

I'd tried to get an idea of this place from Google maps, but either they'd mislabeled it or I'd misunderstood what I was looking at, but I'd been completely wrong about this RV park.  Where I ran into it was considered the "lower level" which meant it was half a block down the hill from the "upper level" which was where the Baptist church also was.  The campsites on the "lower level" were all backed right up to the edge of a steep hill that dropped precipitously down almost 2 blocks of distance to the main road below.  

I decided I'd stayed in worse places, there were plug-ins (50 amp only, but I had an adapter to my 30 amp RV) and this was an established business run by the Baptists so how bad could it be for one night.  As I was getting us situated, I noticed quite a few deer tracks right through my little campsite and fervently hoped they wouldn't come back to check us out during the night.

Very strange little place.  The $25 they charged was, as the Baptists pointed out, on the honor system, to be left in little envelopes in their drop box.  I gave them $30, figuring maybe a little extra karma might help us out overnight.