Postcard from the West #5

Across the Great Basin

I’ve often found it hard to land home after a trip. I’ve finally let go of what was pre-occupying me before I left, am in a comfortable rhythm of map-reading and new-area exploring and now it's time to stop? I know now, I do better with re-entry when I get clearer about the transition area between vacation and everyday life.

In ecology, the transition between two ecological communities is called an ecotone: grasslands between deserts and forests or estuaries between river and sea. In triathlons, the transition area is the zone of the course where athletes change from the swim to the bike or bike to the running section of the course. Airports and long flights are the default transition areas for many trips.

The equivalent of a flight’s suspended airspace while driving to California was the Interstate-80 across the Great Basin. Once we caught of Salt Lake City and crossed the Bonneville Salt Flats into Nevada we were officially in our trip’s get-back-home transition phase. The route was scenic, but our travel was now primarily about speed and efficiency.

The other transition area was in our lodging. Instead of camping, we had two nights of hotels lined up on opposite ends of Nevada. In Elko, we landed at a hotel on the outskirts of town with a view of the tips of the Ruby Mountains, a whole other are worthy of exploring on a future trip. We were upgraded to a two-room suite with doors, and after sharing the close confines of a car, a tent, cabins and multiple guest rooms for multiple weeks, the space was more than welcome.

Downtown Elko’s offerings included a strip lined with hotels, casinos, brothels and Basque restaurants. A large Basque population remained in Eastern Nevada after the Gold rush; one could do a whole Basque-themed dining experience across Nevada if so inclined. We weren’t up for a multi-course, meat-heavy Basque meal this late into the trip, and instead sought out somewhere to stretch our legs.

There was an inviting, sage-covered hillside up the hill from the hotel, but we had to pass through a construction zone to get there. Elko has landed at the top of those ‘best places to live’ polls in the state and it looked like a lot of people were relocating there. Once we got through the construction zone, we were in a shrubby, high desert landscape. Mountains and sage, clouds building above the distant mountain range, the edge of the wilds. As we reached the top of the hill, large raindrops began to plop on and around us and we headed back, across newly graded lots through a new suburban neighborhood and to the hotel. I had the feeling the hill we’d just experienced would not be there the next time we came through town.

In the morning, I opened the curtains and was surprised to see a fleet of hot air balloons rising over town. Unbeknownst to us, we’d arrived amid the Ruby Mountain Balloon Festival.

Ten miles out of Elko, we stopped at the California Trail Interpretive Center, featuring an excellent retelling of the Gold Rush-inspired emigrant trail(s) from Missouri to California. It was a lot to take in— retellings of cattle stampeding toward mirages, women dying in childbirth along the trail, the fated Donner Party — and very moving. The various wagons and buggies the emigrants used in their attempts to reach California across rivers, deserts and mountains in the 1840s were a stark contrast to the air-conditioned, hybrid-vehicle in which we were crossing the same terrain.

A(nother) subtext of our trip was how much human development had occurred over the past two hundred years and was continuing to creep across the west at an ever faster clip. The following night, in Sparks, we walked across the street through a strip mall to get to the nearest, relatively natural area. In this case, it wasn’t a trail but a walking path around a small lake, a vestige of swampy wetlands that used to cover a much larger percentage of Truckee Meadows, the basin we were in between the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin.

Nature was doggedly holding on — a small contingent of Canada Geese, Coots, Mallards and Kildeer had found their way to the muddy shore — but after all the open space and camping we had done, how much land had been paved over with impunity was more clear than ever. The path followed a small, willow-shrouded creek feeding into the lake before popping us back into mall-land. I wondered if this would be Elko, ten years into the future. And I — we — were part of the problem.

* A few more Postcards from the West are ‘in the mail.’