Scenes from the Desert

Here are some photos from a trip we took this weekend. It was nice to get out into the desert and travel those back roads.

This old bus depicts what it really means to 'take a wrong turn.'

It was off the side of this twisty mountain road.

My first flowering native plant of 2010--a lomatium, in the Carrot/Parsley family.

The snow on the far off mountains make them seem so much taller and rugged.

Here's a look into the south end of Dugway Proving Ground.

The cracked earth shows how dry it is. This is the terrain that Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, traveled in 1861 on the Overland Stage to get to Reno, Nevada, where he worked for a newspaper. In the book Roughing It, he wrote of his adventure. Apparently he didn't like the backroads as much as I do (although I admittedly had the convenience of modern transportation and March temperatures). This is the description he uses for this part of the trip:

And now we entered upon one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara—an “alkali” desert. For sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that this was really a break…there was a stage station there.

We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole livelong night, and at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five-mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to cross a desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect, in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the ignorant thenceforward…All this was very well and very comfortable and satisfactory—but now we were to cross a desert in daylight. This was fine—novel—romantic—dramatically adventurous—this, indeed was worth living for, worth traveling for! We would write home all about it.

This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour—and then we were ashamed that we had “gushed” so. The poetry was all in the anticipation—there is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach, and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash drifts roosting above mustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the reality of it.

The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air…

…At last we kept it up ten hours, which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert. It was from four in the morning til two in the afternoon. And it was so hot! And so close! And our water canteens went dry in the middle of the day and we got so thirsty! It was so stupid and tiresome and dull!...and truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality…