Basin and Trail

I stayed in Elko NV for two nights, making a total of three nights I've spent there.  The first night was in August 1990, when I was moving from Denver to Redwood City on my way to my new WSFO duty station in Cali.  BTW next month will mark my 25th anniversary of California residence!  In the Elko area, I wanted to see Lamoille Canyon.  Here it is...a classic U shaped glacial valley.  It was actually carved in an early ice age, 250, 000 years ago, and touched up by more recent glaciers about 15,000 years in the past.  It's in the Ruby Mountains, one of many sky islands in the Great Basin desert.  Even though most of Nevada is sagebrush desert, there are many of these alpine outposts that feature snow, lakes, and pines ranging from ponderosa to whitebark to bristlecone.

I went for a hike at the end of the valley road.  Lots of whitebark pines, and if you blow up this pic you can see the car park where my vehicle lies, just about dead center in the picture.  The hike up here was rated moderate but that is for people who are younger and slimmer than I.  Worked pretty damn hard to get up here!  Still, I'm surprised at how quickly I've recovered the day after.  Not bad for an old sloat.

The Lizards came along but they rode in my daypack...didn't have to walk.

A classic alpine lake in a hanging valley above Lamoille Canyon.

And here's Lamoille Lake...the end of the trail, 9700 feet MSL.  There were actually quite a few people here...one guy was fishing from the promontory just before I took the pic, and two young couples jumped into the water from a rock ledge about 15 feet up.  I used to do things like that back in CO in the 1980s but stopped about thirty years ago.

The mighty Humboldt River...the river to nowhere. Rising in the mountains of eastern Nevada, it tracks across the northern part of the state, basically along I-80, for over 300 miles.  But it doesn't go anywhere...it winds up in the Humboldt sink in western Nevada, a marshy area within the Great Basin, which has no outlet to the sea.  The Humboldt nevertheless irrigates a good deal of cropland along its course.  This picture was taken near the rivers' source...it's a little larger farther downstream.

Cactus Pete's endures.  This venerable casino in Jackpot, NV, just south of the Idaho border about 45 miles S of Twin Falls, has serviced travelers and daytripping Idahoans from the Magic Valley for over 50 years.  I first stopped here in March 1963, when my parents and I were returning from a spring break vacation to Salt Lake.  I was 11 at the time, too young to play the slots, but I gave my parents a dollar and asked them to play it for me on the nickel slots, and a jackpot was won!  I got a windfall of a few dollars.  Cactus Pete's is much larger now than it was back then.

This is the Perrine Memorial Bridge over the Snake River Canyon in Twin Falls ID.  Right next to a shopping mall complex sits this impressive span, 486 feet above the water.  Folks bungee jump off the bridge...I saw three of them take the plunge while I was here!  Young folks, fearless, fit, and strong.  This span was built in 1976, replacing an older bridge opened in 1927.  Perrine, the guy who the bridge is named after, basically founded Twin Falls around 1900.

Looking up the Snake River Canyon from the Perrine Bridge.  Obviously, this area was assaulted by basalt in the past, just like the Columbia River gorge about 500 miles downstream.  This canyon was also widened by a massive flood from Lake Bonneville, which overflowed 17,000 years ago and enlarged the existing gorge.  The Bonneville flood was completely different from the Missoula Floods, which shaped the landscape north and northwest of here.  The Ice Age kicked ass!  Blow up this pic and at the top of the canyon rim near the center you'll see an incline.  This is the ramp built by Evel Knievel in 1974 when he attempted to jump the canyon on a motorcycle.  He didn't make it, but when he realized he'd come up short, he deployed his parachute and landed safely at the bottom.

This may look like a little gully eroded by water, but it's not.  It is the rut of the Oregon/California trail, the main route of  the pioneers traveling westward in the middle of the 19th century.  For several decades they rolled right through here; just a few miles farther west they either went northwest to Oregon, or southwest to California.  Either way it was hard travel.  Five percent of the pioneers died.  Thirst, dust, Indian attacks, heat, snow...all were obstacles.  Now, the trail parallels Interstate 86, only a few yards to the left of the picture.  The pioneers would have tripped out if they could have cruised west in a convertible at 80 MPH (the speed limit here) with A/C, ice chests, and a CD player.  But hey, it's still kinda hard travel...not an In-N-Out Burger or Cracker Barrel anywhere in the vicinity.