I’m writing from southeastern Nevada, a border town near both AZ and UT. We had business near here yesterday and drove all day Thursday to get here from NorCal. Parts of that drive are amazingly empty; hour after hour of barren treeless not-quite-desert zoom past at 70-75 mph.
What do I mean by “not-quite-desert?” Treeless, empty landscapes with knee-high sage brush but no cactus or sand. If you see a few trees they are along a creek bed or at some residence where they’re irrigated. Plenty of mountains of mostly bare rock with some minor scrubby low-growing plants, ringing big flattish valleys. Actually much of Nevada looks this way, both southeast across its middle diagonally as we just did it, and across I-80 which crosses northern NV on an east-west trajectory.
The trip included NV 375 - a state highway officially designated as the “Extraterrestrial Highway” which runs past the fabled Area 51, celebrated by Mulder, Scully and Indiana Jones. We saw no exotic flying machines of any sort unfortunately, although official signs warn of “Low Flying Planes.” It is so remote the grazing cattle are free to amble on the road, no fences.
There are plenty of places where the only sign of humans ever having been there is the laser-straight two lane road that disappears into the distance in one point perspective. It is easy driving, little traffic, good roads, fast, vast empty vistas to contemplate, but not interesting after an hour or two.
Today’s agenda includes a visit to Zion National Park, which in December shouldn’t be crowded. We’ve loved Zion since our first visit in the 1970s, but unfortunately over the years it has been “discovered.” Now it is too well loved and if you go during the summer, as we did a couple of years ago, it is wall-to-wall people.
