We left Zion National Park on a gloriously sunny but cold morning (23degF). through the Mt Carmel tunnel, built in 1930. It has several 'windows' to let in light and air. Once we left the canyons of the Park, the land opened out , with ranches and occasional small towns.
We took Highway 14 which is a high mountain road through the Dixie National Forest. The temperature dropped to about –12 deg C. as we crossed the pass at 9900 ft. It is a cross-country skiing area.and there was already some snow on the ground, making it quite pretty.
The road was passable with care, without chains, as it had mostly been cleared and salted, though there were icy patches. We descended steeply and crossed into Nevada on completely empty roads, initially through flat, scrubby land with some farms. As the road crossed more hill country, all signs of human habitation disappeared and some tree cacti appeared among the juniper and sagebrush.
At a crossroads, there was a sign warning that there was no “gas” for 150 miles, but no indication what to do about it if our fuel level was low. We had already travelled at least 100 miles without seeing a fuel station. We probably had just enough fuel to get through but as it was already late afternoon we decided to divert from our route by about 10 miles to a place marked with a tiny dot on the map and were relieved to find a petrol station in the middle of the desert, with many motorists refuelling their vehicles.
Returning to our route, we travelled through mile upon mile of sagebrush desert with tree cacti, and occasional large salt pans, stretching between intermittent brown rocky mountain ranges, with the road running dead-straight for 15-30 miles at a time. The occasional other vehicle which appeared on the horizon took 15 minutes or more to pass us. It was getting dark as we turned onto Highway 375, with a sign noting that it is the 'Extraterrestial Highway', where there have been more reported observations of UFOs than anywhere else on earth. The fact that it is close to large areas used by the military for training and testing purposes may be relevant, as Gary McKinnon might have been trying to investigate. Nearby is the site of the US underground atomic bomb testing programme in the 1950s.
We saw nothing untoward for miles, but then Philip noticed 3 strange lights in a vertical line, following us. Occasionally they disappeared for a short while, but reappeared later in the same position and formation, never getting nearer to us. It didn’t take long to realise that the lights were from three cars probably 10-20 miles behind us. We had to keep our eyes peeled for more earthly encounters, as it was an open range road and one or two steers very occasionally loomed out of the darkness, next to road.
We reached Tonopah in the dark and decided to stop for the night, in a privately owned motel which claimed to be as 'cosy as Grandma's'. It turned out be a bit flouncy, but otherwise nothing special and a bit overpriced. However, a nearby Mexican restaurant produced a tasty meal at a reasonable price.
Monday 7th December
Tonopah was a silver mining town in the first half of the twentieth century and not much has happened there since 1950. In the motel guidebook (the motel owner's pride and joy) there was an amusing story about one of the silver prospectors leaving the town after the boom but returning regularly to check on his property. On his last visit he was furious to find that a large mound of broken rock at the edge of his property had slipped down the hill and, assumed by the local authority to be mine waste, had been used in the construction of a road. Apparently the “waste” was, in fact, high-grade silver ore which he had been keeping until it would be more financially profitable to have it processed. Instead, it seems, the streets of Tonopah were literally paved with siver!
We woke to a cloudy and very cold morning, with a storm forecasted to be coming in from the west, with heavy snowfall over the Sierras. We realised that we had made the biggest blunder on our journey as our map indicated (in miniscule print) that all minor east-west routes over the High Sierras are closed in the winter. It was clear that they certainly would be closed by the forecast snow, so we would have to much further south or north than we had planned, to get on to passable routes across the Sierra Nevada range. We chose to go south, for a better chance of catching rain rather than snow. As we drove through a desolate landscape we asked ourselves why people in their right minds would want to live in Nevada. The answer is not ‘minds’ but ‘mines’. We passed through some deserted settlements, while Goldfield was all but a ghost town. There were one or two signs of extraction of some mineral or other in the barren grey-brown mountains and foothills. The only other feature in the environment was the occasional huge salt pan, one of which we could see was covered in ice. The temperature dropped to -7 deg C as we went over a pass at 4300ft, above Death Valley, marking the border with California, then rose to 15 deg C as we descended on to the Valley floor.
It is a vast area of sand and rock, with tussock grass, mostly flat, but with large sand dunes in places. Maximum temperatures here are close to the highest recorded on Earth. At Stovepipe Wells, on the main road through the valley, the elevation is at sea level, but the lowest point in the valley is nearly 300ft lower.
It turned cloudy as we ascended out of Death Valley at its western edge, then began to rain as we crossed a pass and descended to Trona. It was a depressing town beside a large dry lake, set against grey-brown hills,with a mineral processing plant blowing out clouds of smoke into a grey sky. (trona = trisodium hydrogendicarbonate dihydrate, a source of soda ash from natural evaporation as an alternative to conversion from salt and limestone). The town revealed high levels of dereliction, with vandalised houses and cars, closed-down shops and petrol stations. We moved on swiftly to the much more prosperous town of Ridgecrest, 20 miles away, where we stopped for lunch. The difference between the two towns can probably be summed up by “the Forces”, as Ridgetown is surrounded by large military bases, including the Edwards Air Force Base.
As we turned on to Highway 58 at Mojave, the rain turned to snow and we were very soon into a snowstorm. About 3 inches of snow accumulated in 30 minutes and the road became very slippery, with poor visibility.
The traffic mostly slowed to10-15mph but some cars and lorries continued much too fast for the conditions. Over about an hour, we passed three crashes + saw two near-misses as cars spun on the snow. After about 90minutes, the snow turned to very heavy rain and there were further minor accidents and incidents. At one point, Philip noticed a police car, about 400 yards behind us, slowing the traffic by swerving across all three lanes. As he thought that there might be an accident ahead, he also slowed. This was just as well, as a car suddenly appeared in the outer lane, travelling in the wrong direction towards us and did a rapid u-turn into the inner lane about 200yds ahead of us! Despite this mayhem, the traffic continued to travel much too fast and too close behind other cars. By far the worst and most aggressive were drivers of the numerous pick-up trucks, the equivalent of the UK “white-van man”.
Note that the UK concept of an outer fast lane and an inner slow lane has no meaning here. Despite signs exhorting driving in the inner lane except when overtaking, vehicles travel at speeds well above and below the speed limits in all lanes, overtake on either side, make rapid lane changes without signalling and frequently cross all lanes abruptly to exit from the freeway. All that, together with their drivers’ penchant for following so closely that they wouldn’t have a cat-in-hell’s chance of stopping in the event of an accident, despite their (doubtless) certainty of their supreme driving ability, explains why the US has had (and probably still has) such a poor record for motor vehicle accidents, injuries and deaths. We’re not clear why the driving standard deteriorated so much, from about West Virginia westwards we think, from the good driving we observed on the east coast – we can only assume that the most unreconstructed macho idiots took their genes west, leaving the effete, cautious types behind.
Although the rain stopped, it was obvious that we would be very late getting into Yosemite National Park, especially as it was reported that 5 inches of snow had fallen on the road into the Park in the afternoon and more was forecast. As we were somewhat exhausted by the difficult driving conditions, and it was already dark, we cancelled the first night's room booking in Yosemite Lodge and stopped at a motel in Fresno. This proved to be a good move.
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