We’re here safely in Baker, NV! This is an accomplishment, as the road today was long, barren and deserted. In fact, today’s drive is officially known as the loneliest road in America! We began today in Fernley, NV at one end of Route 50. Then we drove to the other end, which is at the Utah border, and where we are staying tonight. You may remember that we just changed our route to go to this destination a couple of days ago, because we wanted to add another National Park to our trip.
There was some stress to setting out on today’s drive, knowing it was long and lonely. The “what if” creeps in when you are heading into such remote territory. (The same will apply tomorrow, but to a lesser extent) But we decided that we wanted to do it in order to see Great Basin National Park. We are so glad that we did.
Our commute may have encountered 100 cars over 5+ hours of driving, and I’m being generous. Six of them were corvettes that were at one of the gas stops, clearly making the trek together. Others were semi’s, quite a few RVs (likely doing the same thing we were), and then a few other random cars. It was basically a two lane road most of the way, with not much between a handful of small towns along our journey. We made sure to get gas at nearly every stop, but otherwise just enjoyed the views on a clear, comfortable day.
The road traversed between 4-7,000 feet, several times over. The landscape offered sweeping barren vistas surrounded by desolate mountain areas, then entered “forested” regions that did offer some spotty tree coverage. We saw snow-covered peaks in the distance, and the rare instance of green pastures, where you wondered where their water source came from. It was incredible, and different again from all of our other drives across this vast nation.
We visited Great Basin National Park today, as we weren’t sure that we will be able tomorrow if there is a government shutdown overnight. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get a cave tour (sold out since this was a last minute add on for us in the past few days), and Livvy will only take us to limited areas of the park; there is a 24 foot limit for the last part of the scenic drive. So today, we visited what we could. There are two visitors centers and we could make it up a few miles on the scenic drive. What we could see was stunning! Unfortunately, no visitors could make it to the end of the drive because they have already closed the road a couple of miles ahead of us for the season. It was still better than our original plan to be here in the sweltering heat of the spring, and so we fully embraced our visit!
As we left the park, we had to check out the place we had hoped to stay in the spring (sold out tonight) and it’s neighboring campground (also sold out tonight). This is why we don’t like to do last minute reservations. But we did stop at the general store that is highly rated near them, and it did not disappoint!
We stopped in to finalize our check-in and had a couple of beers in the bar/casino area. It was… well, it was what you would expect on the loneliest road in America. We made the smart decision to NOT eat there and just enjoy the sights. The people watching, from serious gamblers to the touring elderly Austrian couple was fantastic. Although I still hope that the stargazing tonight becomes the best sights of the day. We’ve waited a long time and came all this way today in order to check out this park and its dark sky reputation.
More to come on that tomorrow! For now, we sit inside making dinner and awaiting the stars to come out. We’ll decide our route for the rest of the trip based on the status of the US government/national parks in the coming days.
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