Great Basin tales
Sunday, 26 March 2023
Here’s a cheerful bit of embodied history embellishing the courtyard outside our room this morning.
Our first major stop was Zabriskie Point. It’s likely you’ve seen it in fashion shoots or a movie. I was there.
I liked this formation the best. I call it Black Cap.
Art by MotherNachur took a different turn as we proceeded northward in the Great Basin. When a cloud is touching the ground, it means (usually) precipitation. If it’s cold enough, well, you get my drift.
Oh, let me interject a photo of mountains not created by MotherNachur. According to my info, this is from an adjacent big hole in the ground made by a gold-mining company.
Austin Pass on US-50. We were so happy the roads were wet and not snowy or icy. Full speed ahead!
And we were even happier to see snow on the summits far above us, and pleasant temps in the valley where we are now. This has been quite a day for zooming through the Great Basin; it’s endorheic, and has no natural drainage outlets. And it’s huge. And relatively unpeopled.
I’m not sure how to read this in any detail, but those blobs over northern California are what we are avoiding by swinging inland and north, to, ultimately, access the Oregon coast from the north. Those blobs mean heavy precip, and at elevations it means snow, and that area has many relatively high passes on the roads out to the coast. Our Nevada legs have worked perfectly (despite a bit of graupel and a few wet flakes); we hope our luck continues in Oregon.