Nathan posted on July 12, 2010 12:03
I am writing this rather hurriedly this morning. We want to get away before the sun gets too hot. Yesterday seems to have been a simple day. We got up, drove, stopped for lunch, drove, and got here.
Of course, some things did happen along the way. We left Butch Cassidy campground a little later than we wanted to, but no harm done when there’s no deadline to meet. From Salina, we drove past a couple of small towns to Richfield. The trail routed us along a canal road, which was small and sometimes very bumpy, but it ended up bringing us into Richfield through one of the more posh neighborhoods. In Richfield, we all had a few errands to run, so we split ways with plans to meet in a parking lot. NH took a test for his online class (he’s working on a Master’s degree in leadership), and then we picked up some groceries.
From Richfield, we had several miles over a small mountain range before we hit open desert. We actually lost the trail at one point—the mountain was covered in ATV trails—but the GPS saved us, and we hit the correct road on the other side of the mountain.
By this time, it was starting to get very hot. We were crisscrossing a creek the whole way down the mountain, and at one point I was so hot that I got out and walked in the creek to cool down. I wasn’t thinking how loose the dirt on the road was, and when I came to get out, I found myself facing the prospect of very muddy Chacos in our already dusty Jeep. Fortunately, NH pack-horsed me out and into the vehicle. What a guy! :)
Caleb also lent us his Misty Mate, a genius invention which he uses while flying in hot weather—no AC in the cockpit, apparently. It has a hand pump that allows you to build up pressure, and then a small hose which, when the valve is opened, emits a fine mist—just enough to evaporate and cool the skin. Thank you, Caleb!
Just after the mountains, we entered the small town of Kanosh. Kanosh is a very nice, very small, Mormon town. Tiny brick houses with their small lacy Victorian porches, obvious landmarks of a past era, were kept up neatly with flowers in every garden. The one next to the local station where we stopped for gas had a log cabin of a shed in the back yard. On a Sunday, around 1:30, we met several young people walking past us home from church. Businesses weren’t open, but we sat on the bench in front of the service station, drinking bottles of soda and watching a small rainstorm roll in.
The weather has been somewhat rainier than we expected—we’ve run into small patches of rain every day. While I think this has increased the humidity, making the hot sun feel even hotter, it has certainly brought cool periods where we have roiling cloud cover, cooler winds, and brief spatters of rain.
If rain did hit Kanosh while we were there, it was so little that I don’t remember it. From Kanosh we had 80 miles of open desert with nothing, and I mean nothing, by way of civilization. The roads were very smooth, though, and NH had fun speeding through the desert. We made it to the state line in just over an hour.
We are camped just over the border in Nevada. The Jeep is parked right on the trail—no worries of traffic. Last night while I watched over supper, Carl got out his shotgun and clay pigeons, and the boys shot skeet. After supper they got out the fireworks and gave the local wildlife—nothing more than a few lizards, bugs, desert rats, and a snake or two—another run for its money.
West of us is Great Basin National Park—I am looking at it's mountains now. We won’t actually drive in the park; the trail routes south around it and then continues west. I will be surprised if we get any rain today. The sky is clean blue, no clouds anywhere. But the scene may change on the other side of the mountains.
Written by E Henson
