West of Winnemucca
The ride down Rt. 80 from Snyderville to Salt Lake City is always fun. It’s a regular roller coaster that drops 2,000 vertical feet. During the fifteen years I owned a place in Park City, I’m guessing I made that ride over 500 times. It’s a big wide highway that makes you want to go fast, but if you know the road like I do, you know that some prudence is suggested if you don’t want to find yourself puckering up your backside. You see, those 18-wheelers can’t help themselves but barrel down that canyon. And at the bottom of Immigration Canyon, everything spills out onto Parley’s Creek neat where our friends Deb and Melissa live. We started our day today on that roller coaster as we headed towards breakfast at a Greek diner near the University of Utah campus, where we met Kim’s friends Joni and Basel.
After some Greek French Toast (is that a thing?) and some friendly mutual updating, we headed off towards the Great Salt Lake to the west. That lake is the biggest lake west of the Mississippi and its high salt content has little to do with any natural mineral deposits and everything to do with the fact that three rivers flow in and none flow out. The low flat profile of the plain on which it sits allows the sun baking to evaporate off all the water that flows in, leaving all the natural salt deposits that exist in any river in the basin. That leaves the Great Salt Lake a veritable Dead Sea that cannot support fish life but can grow plenty of algae. The closest I’ve ever gotten to the lake is when I went to the oddly located Golden Spike National Park on the north side of the lake in the middle of nowhere. That’s where the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads first met in 1869 to connect the country by rail from coast to coast. As best I can tell, the rest of the lake is just a bunch of evaporating ponds where somebody must be extracting salt.
We all know how important salt is to mankind’s existence (not to mention all other animals). We take salt for granted these days, but all the way up to modern day, finding salt was a big part of sustaining life. Imagine the elation of Brigham Young when in July 1847, he and his band of weary Mormans stumbled down Immigration Canyon onto Parley Creek and then discovered the salt of the Great Salt Lake . It must have felt like finding gold at Sutter’s Mill (which happened the next year).
Highway 80 tracks along the south shore of the lake and then runs out the flat to Wendover, the home of the Bonneville Salt Flats where all the land speed records get made. Wendover is also the state line where Nevada and Utah meet. South of Wendover is the Great Basin, which is pretty desolate, but no more so than the area to the west. We see a sign that says next rest area 114 miles. That’s a long way to go when nature calls.
When planning this road trip, I wanted a spot to stop between Salt Lake City and Sonoma. The most central spot in this northern part of the Nevada wilderness seemed to be the town of Winnemucca. That’s one of those towns with a recognizable name that you can’t remember why you know it. So, I booked a room in a Winnemucca Holiday Inn. Then, this morning as I looked at the GPS when we had finished our Greek breakfast, I realized we would get to Winnemucca at about 2pm including the time zone gain of an hour at the Utah/Nevada border. I’m brave, but not brave enough to spend a half day in Winnemucca, so Kim and I decided we would rebook in Reno so that our ride into Sonoma on Saturday would be real easy.
Northern Nevada is very special. I’m used to driving over the Mojave, so I shouldn’t be so offput by the wide open spaces, but have you ever looked at how wide Northern Nevada is? We drove through 634 miles of pretty much nothing. It was actually exciting to finally reach a town in the middle of all this nowhere. Well, exciting might be an overstatement, but Elko was st least worthy of a glance and when we finally got to Winnemucca it felt like we were getting somewhere. We passed a National Museum of Western Expansion or some such thing with Calistoga wagons out front. Like all federal facilities it looked twice as nice as any other building we passed, reminding us all that once we humans had suffered to cross all this nothingness, we damn well weren’t going to abandon it to nature any time soon. Americans struggled as long ago as only 150 years to gut it out crossing this wilderness to go where? I guess to the gold fields of California.
I’m sure some found gold in them thar hills, but a few must have figured somewhere along the way that this spot in the shadow of Sonoma Peak and with a trickle of water from Harmony Creek was worth settling. Somebody decided along the way that this was as good as it gets. Amazing. I’ve spoken this week of cognitive dissonance, when our mind allows us to convince ourselves that we have chosen well and made the right decision for ourself. Whoever decided that stopping their westward push in Winnemucca was a good choice must have been imbued with very powerful cognitive dissonance capability. Had they ventured another hundred miles they could have made it to Lake Tahoe, which at least looks beautiful and worthy as a place to stop and decide to make a life around. I want to know who thought Winnemucca was a good idea.
I suppose I’m being too harsh on Winnemucca. Maybe if I did more than just breeze through this wide spot in the road with my air conditioning on high, I might find some very nice things about the place. But as it was, I had cancelled my reservation at the Holiday Inn (without refund, I might say) and rebooked in Reno. From what I know of Reno (the second largest city in Nevada), it at least is a place I can recollect being here for a reason for mankind. Isn’t this where people came for quickie divorces back in the day? It doesn’t look that different from Winnemucca from Rt. 80, but we stopped and checked into the hotel to then search for some fine dining. Instead we found an Outback Steak House. You have to love a town in the desolate Nevada desert deciding that what it really needs to do is import a steakhouse from the desolate part of Australia and that that would make the difference in this place being livable. Even though it was only 5pm, the place was packed, so who am I to suggest that Outback didn’t make all the difference to the good people of Reno. I guess celebrating the end of a bad marriage with an inexpensive steak dinner makes sense.
In the next few hours we will cross the threshold into our beloved California and be back home. We will still be two days drive from the hilltop, but at least we will be on Pacific time and in a state that still respects human dignity enough to pursue liberal ideology. We have made it across the wide swath of America that prefers being red to being blue. It’s been a great journey, but I must admit to feeling more comfortable now that we are finally west of Winnemucca.