Trip to Utah in Fall 2004
These are our photos from a great hiking trip to Moab, Utah. We drove from San Francisco to get there, and a lot of our photos at the beginning and end of the set are of fun stops along the way. Pictures will be displayed in order. After seeing each picture, click on it to see the next one. If you want to skip some, you can see small versions of the next 15 that are coming at the bottom. Click on the first one of those that you want to see, and you will skip ahead.
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Larry took most of the photos, and Bill processed them, installed them on the web site, and wrote the narrative and photo descriptions. His narrative up through the first day we took photos starts below. We recommend you read the daily narratives for complete information. Captions are often not put on individual photos if the daily narrative which precedes them makes it clear what they are.
Narrative: Wednesday, September 29:
We left San Francisco about one o'clock, driving up through Sacramento, and then taking US 50 through the Sierra and over to Lake Tahoe. We stopped briefly there for a snack and Larry left a few quarters in the slot machines. We then went through Carson City as the sun set, arriving in Fallon, NV, a bit after dark. We took a motel room there, and the motel gave us a coupon for "2 for 1" for dinner plus two rolls of nickels for the slot machines, so we took advantage of all that stuff. We also played a few games of Keno while we ate, and Larry won one of the games and got $3. Big winner he was.
Thursday, September 30:
Fallon is a farming town, its environs well-irrigated with waters flowing down from the Sierra. Fallon is as far east as such waters flow. Going back westward from Fallon the land was populated all the way to the Pacific Ocean, heavily nourished by the Sierra's heavy rain and snowfall. A few miles out of Fallon the lush green fields end at a sharply drawn line, and one immediately rolls into a desert. This desert runs on for hundreds of miles, and we will be in it for the rest of our trip.
As the sun rose, we headed off across the Nevada desert on "the Loneliest Highway in America", US 50. It used to have signs saying that every so often but we didn't see any this time. We asked a lady in Eureka where we stopped for a late-morning snack what happened to the signs. She said they kept getting stolen, so they don't replace them anymore. We did see one later that afternoon, and it was the only one we saw for the entire length of the highway. It seemed like there was more traffic on the road this time compared to when we first traveled it twenty years ago, but it still is pretty desolate out there. We had lunch in Ely, the biggest of the small Nevada towns along the route today.
We stopped at Great Basin National Park, located on the eastern edge of Nevada, in late afternoon. Up to this point we have traveled the route so many times that we did not take any photos. We dug out the camera in the visitors' center parking lot, and we set off on the park's 12 mile scenic drive, which took us up to over 10,000 feet. We saw lots of beautiful color from turning aspens and we saw several deer.
We had dinner in Baker, just outside the park, then drove on to Delta, Utah, where we got a room for the night. We got there about an hour after dark. We also gained an hour at the state line, so that made it even later. Larry went into the office at a motel and no one was there. They had left a note by the phone saying to call the motel lady at her home, and she arrived in three minutes. Delta is a really small town. She said things were so slow this time of year that it wasn't worth her while to spend the evening in the office. She only rented out two other rooms that night besides the one to us.
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