{"id":7148,"date":"2010-06-26T22:01:44","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T05:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7148"},"modified":"2010-06-27T20:23:58","modified_gmt":"2010-06-28T03:23:58","slug":"road-trip-notebook-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7148","title":{"rendered":"Road trip notebook: Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming"},"content":{"rendered":"

We left Winnemuca late, just after ten this morning. East of Winnemuca, the scenery is spectacular: wide, flat basins divided from one another by mountain ranges. We stopped briefly in Valmy, Nevada. One building houses the gas station, the restaurant, the convenience store, a few slot machines, the bar, and the U.S. post office. There was a small motel next door, with what looked to be only four units. The whole complex appeared to be for sale. We bought a few postcards — one of the ones I chose showed a dessicated skeleton lying in the dessert, the other showed a jackalope — and mailed them.<\/p>\n

Elko is a small relaxed city with broad streets and a mix of older buildings and new buildings. We stopped in at the Western Folklife Center’s<\/a> gift store. I looked at their books; they had lots of books of cowboy poetry, and quite a few books on Basque culture. I bought a book about a potter who decided to live in the backcountry of Nevada with his wife and school-aged boys. We ate lunch at the Blind Onion, which was mostly empty even though it was one in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

We ground up the grade to Pequop summit, 6,967 feet above sea level. New Englander that I am, I couldn’t help thinking that if you rotated the final letter of “Pequop” 180 degrees, you’d get the name of Captain Ahab’s whale ship.<\/p>\n

We had to stop at the Great Salt Flats rest stop, just over the border in Utah. While we were wandering over the salt flats, we watched as a west-bound Union Pacific train pulled into a siding while another UP train sped east on the main line.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Carol looking at the mixed freight in the siding.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Climbing out of Salt Lake City, the highway wound up a canyon. After the deserts of northern Nevada, and after the Great Salt Flats, I was amazed at how green everything was in the Wasatch Mountains. We stopped in Park City, Utah, for a break. The beautiful green mountainsides were dotted with pretentious over-done houses, tasteful McMansions winding up the mountainsides below the ski slopes. Upscale malls were everywhere. We stopped to get coffee in a chain store — my decaf tasted burnt and bitter, and I wound up throwing it out — and I read the local paper: a reckless skiing case resulted in a non-context plea; more businesses close on Main Street (we couldn’t find Main Street amongst all the malls, so it’s no wonder); a ribbon-cutting at a housing complex for people who work in support jobs; a woman drove a car (specified as a “BMW 5 series”) into a local reservoir. I found Park City oppressive, and was glad when we drove on.<\/p>\n

The spectacular beauty of the Wasatch Mountains blended into the spacious beauty of western Wyoming, with its wide-open skies, purple mountains in the distance, strange rock formations, and farms of huge white spinning wind turbines. The sun set about nine o’clock, and the sky was still a little bit light when we pulled into Rock Springs, Wyoming, at ten. A big full moon lit up the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We left Winnemuca late, just after ten this morning. East of Winnemuca, the scenery is spectacular: wide, flat basins divided from one another by mountain ranges. We stopped briefly in Valmy, Nevada. One building houses the gas station, the restaurant, the convenience store, a few slot machines, the bar, and the U.S. post office. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sauntering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7148"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7154,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148\/revisions\/7154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}