We’ve arrived at the congregation of the elderly found in Mom’s Diner in Pahrump, Nevada. With about a dozen of us in here by the time we were ready to leave, our collective age is approaching a four-digit number I’d need a calculator to figure out. Off the main drag, this is obviously a locals’ place, easily evidenced by literally everyone who’s walked in showing their familiarity with everyone else. If it was Sunday, I might think we were in church; this being rural Nevada, it just might be a form of church anyway. Our no-nonsense breakfast was everything one might hope for from a place surviving the constant onslaught of the big chains encroaching on these still independent joints that grow rarer every year. At what point must we capitulate and join the herd at the drive-thru window collecting a coffee and a breakfast sandwich instead of finding these bastions where the hits of the 70s arrive with the half-surly attitudes of servers working the crowd armed with pots of coffee keeping our mugs topped off? With more than 500 miles through the empty western edge of this state ahead of us, we are now ready to take on the day.

Layers have never failed to attract us with their stories which are not easily understood beyond the basic idea that sedimentary collections of the earth have formed due to erosion or accumulation of marine layers, and then the tectonics of plate movement move things around, producing folds and tilting to remind you that, as measured in earth time, the force of our planet is something to be amazed by. I should point out we are near the far eastern edge of Death Valley National Park, a place of great colorful layering. If time allowed, we’d be detouring through it, but we are on a fairly tight schedule with a couple of destinations we must reach, one today in Susanville, California, and another farther northwest we’ll be driving to tomorrow (Sunday).

In yesterday’s post, I wrote of needing to remain current each day with the sharing of photos and my thoughts. I should have considered taking familiar freeways which would have limited our opportunities to stop and gawk at beautiful stuff, but by avoiding the beaten paths, half of our route today will traverse areas that are new to us and will require many stops to admire the beauty of it all. To that end, I prepped 25 of the more than 200 photos I shot today, and now my job is to try writing something or other for each image included in this post. The trick will be that at the time I’m typing this it is already Sunday morning, one day after I took these photos, and we will soon be heading out of our motel for breakfast and then we’ll embark on another nearly 500-mile drive while stopping just as frequently to take even more photos.

Before leaving Arizona, I’d seen that the media was flush with stories about the HEAT DOME terrorizing the western U.S. Well, sure enough, it’s hot out here in the desert, but not so hot that everything is burned to a crisp, which was what we were expecting. The lush, deep green of springtime in the arid landscape would enchant us for the majority of the day, capturing just how spectacular it all looked would prove somewhat elusive, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Pulling into Donkeyville, USA, a.k.a. Beatty, Nevada, we were surprised by a new casino under construction that is taking shape in the form of a steampunk-themed place. As for the herd of donkeys we’d seen here on our last visit, no sign of them this morning, but the steampunk tuna, along with the insects and other stuff on the iron-clad façade, are definitely a draw requiring a stop.

Sometimes, when we are out in the Western United States, we can never really be sure if we are traveling a road we’ve been on before and simply forgot to note it on our map of the U.S., but here in Goldfield, Nevada, once the state’s largest town, we are now certain we’ve never been to this outpost taking on the appearance of becoming a ghost town. There is so much more to see here, but only so much space on the blog and only so much I can write to capture our day.

We’ve seen one of these sunsticks before, over in California on a previous trip. This is the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Tonopah, Nevada, which uses mirrors below the tower to concentrate the light of the sun on the tower where, typically, a Sterling Engine works to generate electricity.

It never fails that while out on a road trip, we are reminded of the reasons we love being out here in the sparsely populated Western U.S., it is the stark, wide-open spaces where time has been slowed down regarding human change played upon the landscape. But I’m jumping the gun because farther north, we’ll learn about the carnage our policies have had on Native American populations that once flourished in the area until land use and the abuse of water rights have worked to destroy livelihoods, traditions, and the environment.

Back in the golden age of road travel, along the routes that sliced across America, travelers would find garages to repair their cars, diners serving up grilled porterhouse steaks and potatoes, next to gift shops inspiring kids to beg their parents to collect souvenirs which would paint their childhoods with memories of distant places in exotic landscapes. Caroline and I have heard so many times that we could never keep count of those who cannot believe that we are driving so far away when flying is so convenient in their eyes.

In Mina, Nevada, we passed a now-defunct brothel south of town; it was called the Wild Cat. Passing through, not much remains of Mina, including this closed motel, but there was a great little Mexican joint selling Mexican/American food and ice cream. It’s obviously popular with passing truckers based on the three big rigs across the street.

What a weird landscape there is to be found in Hawthorne, Nevada. On the north side of this immaculately clean town, we learned why things are the way they are; this is the home of the World’s Largest Ordinance Depot. With that knowledge and seeing how empty Hawthorne was of people and how many shuttered businesses there were, we decided to make a U-turn to visit the Hawthorne Ordinance Museum before the draw-down of the facility turns Hawthorne into another dusty, crumbling bunch of ruins next to the road. Wouldn’t you know it? Four crusty veterans were working at the museum, trying hard to get us to leave with some souvenirs.

Unexploded munitions might be present. Somehow, that’s enticing; who doesn’t want to see something go boom?

How often do we see signs telling us of wildlife and neither hide nor hair can be found? But for once that roadside message a mile ago telling us to be aware of big horn sheep was telling the truth.

This is a dead zone known as Walker Lake. It is dead because the volume of the lake being drawn down due to incoming water flows being diverted for agriculture, has had the effect of turning the lake toxic to aquatic life. The cutthroat trout that once called this home is long gone, and the Paiute Indians who relied on them can instead visit the McDonalds just down the road in Hawthorne, so at least there’s that.

Reason #3472 to hate Google: their stupid service told us that the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitors Center in Nixon, Nevada, was closed today. The building was so intriguing that we drove up to find a place to grab a photo even if we couldn’t go in, and it turned out that the place was open. It’s a small place once inside, but we did learn that during Burning Man in the nearby Black Rock Desert, they get incredibly busy, maybe too busy.

Out of the museum, looking for the best angle to take my photo of the museum, I came across the most chill lizard I’ve ever had the chance to encounter. I took over a dozen images as I inched closer and closer to this guy/gal. Not only that, Caroline also got down to eye level just a few inches away from mini-Godzilla to take a dozen photos for herself. I can only imagine that the lizard sensed our good karma.

At Pyramid Lake on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal lands, we learned that the lake and an island in the lake play host to breeding pelicans. While I tried to grab a halfway decent photo using my 200mm lens, it was a struggle to get anything better than this, and this is already seriously cropped in.

This is one of the namesake rock formations. Actually, it’s tufa that is formed from calcium leaching into the lake which combined with carbonate dissolved in the water to form the mounds. Even away from the shoreline on other side of the road we were driving on, there were tufas that formed well outside of the lake. This is because Pyramid Lake was once part of a much larger and deeper body of water called Lake Lahontan. That lake disappeared about 9,000 years ago.

It just so happens that the book that Caroline is reading to us right now is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. A section in one of the early chapters we read yesterday referred to Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, a French soldier and explorer in 17th-century North America who in the years before his death in 1716 had published books about Native Americans and their ideas of freedom and equality to educate the “Western World” (read: Europe). Today, we were learning about the historical lake system that Pyramid Lake was once part of, and, yep, Lake Lahontan was named after that baron guy. By the way, at this point this photo is taken from a dirt road as the paved road had already stopped.

Slowly, we crept over the gravel road with a minor amount of washboard and again, here we were astonished that we are the lucky ones out seeing the sights seldom seen.

One minute we were pulled over to the side of the road taking a photo to establish where we were on the map thinking we were alone as nobody passed us in the previous half-hour…

…when I thought I heard a motor, but there was no one on the roads at the intersection we’d turned on. From out of the brush and over a small hill, a woman wearing her pistol, listening to Cotton-eyed Joe from the Rednex gives us a wave before we were about to jump back into the car. Denise Liscom was the friendly person out rockhounding and just roaming the wide-open landscape ready to handout hugs, share information about a nearby hot spring, and ultimately invite us to her home on a future visit. But wait, there’s more! Sean Liscom, her husband is home and as he and I both enjoy writing, she asked that we stop by and say hi and talk about our chance meeting out in the middle of serious nowhere, because seriously, these two live really away from it all. It turns out that Sean writes post-apocalyptic fiction and is a prepper and while I don’t think his writing fits into our eggheaded non-fiction books and occasional bouts of classic flowery novels that we are more accustomed to reading, he is ranked #14 in Disaster Fiction on Amazon and has thousands upon thousands of reviews, not an easy feat. It’s funny how you never know who you might meet on the backroads of America, but we couldn’t have asked to encounter friendlier people.

And then there was this standoffish small gang of horses who appeared to be contemplating committing hoof-mayhem on our personhoods should we get too cheeky and want to approach them.

While it is not sunset yet, we passed from Nevada into California at the end of the dirt road and rode into the rest of the day and Susanville where we had a room booked, otherwise, I’m pretty certain that Denise would have corralled us into staying out their way.