The Middle of Nowhere Nevada

Our 3 days in Nevada defied all of our expectations. Our travel plans in NV were also pretty loose… as I mentioned in the last post, we didn’t have a set plan on where were going to stay on our first night. We wound up at a rest stop about 30 miles of Tonopah.

We woke up in the morning, the only people around, to snowy peaks, bright pink skies and a thoroughly desolate high desert landscape. It was stunningly beautiful, and exciting, as the novelty of the snow and cold air mixed with the thrill of waking up somewhere new and unexpected. We watched the sunrise,  packed up and turned back onto lonely Rt. 6.

The first part of our drive was beautiful. There were pockets of snow sprinkled throughout the sagebrush, and heavy dustings on the mountain peeks. The air was freshly cold and smelled like ice. There was something about the freshly fallen snow and a poignancy in it being the first snowfall of the season.

But then, the beautiful snow in the distance became the slushy wet snow flurrying against our windshield. Around 11, our day turned from an exciting and carefree journey to an exhausting and somewhat stressful stretch. We are still getting Hazelnut used to driving in the RV. As of right now (1 week later) she is only about 40% afraid for her life. On this day, she was 95% afraid for her life. And so we drove a long day up and down the mountain passes of Nevada, through an almost continual snow flurry controlling a Hazelnut who continually lurched in various directions beneath my seat at any moment she felt like her life was being threatened. Needless to say, by the end of the day we were exhausted and somewhat on edge. Around 5 o’clock we pulled into a free BLM campground right off of Rt. 50 whose land sat right on the border of Great Basin National park. The campground was mostly empty, and we pulled into a private spot and hunkered down for another cold night.

We woke for sunrise, took a long walk on a beautiful trail that circled and climbed over a large quartz outcropping and then hastily hit the road, hoping to escape the cold.

-Annie