Another trip through the Rockies

I haven't posted in a while, and for a very good reason - I went back to Nevada. By way of my college town, where I spent a week and change catching up with old friends and waiting out some nasty late winter storms.

But I'm back, and this time I have a blog, and some confirmed readers outside of the realms of random (but beloved!) strangers from Leftbook. Let's start from the beginning.

First off, that gorgeous pic to the left. I ended up doing a favor for some friends and delivering some goods to Denver, getting some gas money in exchange for saving them a trip. Denver is slightly out of the way; I can travel from Omaha to the collective by hopping on and off I-80. But if the detour pays for itself, well, I-70 west of Denver is probably the most picturesque piece of interstate in America. It certainly has the most picturesque traffic jams; I don't generally whip out my phone in heavy traffic but everyone was at a standstill.

I got the idea for driving this southern route through a new genre of video called "slow TV," and particularly a channel called Unclecoolie Productions. Someone just sets their GoPro to record an entire trip across a bunch of America, Canada, or occasionally Germany. It's not the kind of thing you watch because it's inherently compelling; it's something to have on in the background while you're listening to music or talking to friends. But this channel demonstrated a fairly easy and direct route from Denver to Salt Lake City, and a beautiful one no less (see for yourself to the right if you're interested in the genre).

I woke up in Stirling, CO, and got to the friends in Denver pretty quickly, leaving town before noon. I-76, Denver's interstate in the general direction of Nebraska, flows seamlessly into I-70 near their old house, in fact. I followed the flow into the mountains.

I-70 is an interesting road because it's a full-on interstate, but huge stretches of it through Colorado are limited to 55 mph. I drive an older van so I generally try not to go over 55 anyway, but as laden as it was with useful stuff from Nebraska, I wasn't going to push it through the mountains. But honestly, the stretch west of Denver may be the tallest mountains in the lower 48, but it's not the steepest climb/descent. I-75 through the Appalachians, I-25 through Raton Pass, and I-80 just east of Salt Lake City can fight for that honor but it's close.

In any case, I got to drive through the roof of the continent. Colorado has its own unique city planning logic up in the mountains. The cities, the river or creek they're inevitably near, and the road you're driving on all have to fit in a very claustrophobic valley. This leads to relatively dense housing complexes, but also towns spaghettified along the interstate, able to fit two or three other entire parallel roads in the valley before the mountains close in. As with any area of natural beauty, the rich have bought it all up. Vail might be a nice place to live, but I could never afford to find out, and I'm not sure I'd want to.

At Rifle, CO, one leaves I-70 and takes two different state roads north to a town called Dinosaur, CO, which apparently went all in on the prehistoric paleontological finds nearby. At Dinosaur one gets on US Highway 40, turns west again, and shortly thereafter leaves Colorado for Utah.

There's a scene in SLC Punk where the characters drive east to Wyoming to buy beer. The feeling of licentiousness on one side of the border versus strict moral order on the other doesn't feel like it still holds. Utah legalized medical marijuana, and the LDS Church was onboard when they did it. Probably my favorite red state after Nebraska. I give the Mormons a lot of ironic shit but honestly, the results of their church speak for themselves. Salt Lake City is a fundamentally decent place where it seems like working people can still make a living, and people are still interested in solving things like homelessness. Maybe it was never a New Jerusalem, but it's certainly a start. They outsource their vices to nearby expert Nevada, and just on the other side of those Bonneville flats, they can gamble and toke and whore it up to their hearts' content. That those are what pass as vices in Utah is almost quaint; I last could afford indignation over such moral turpitude during the Clinton administration. But it works; it's an orderly state with well-kept rest areas and lovely vistas that makes you feel welcome as you drive through.

Highway 40 ends up meeting back up with I-80 near Heber City, UT. By the time I rolled into Heber City, I was ready to sleep, so I settled in uncomfortably in the front seat, the entire rest of the van laden with electrical goods and living plants and whatnot.

Every time I drive through Salt Lake City, I intend to stop and take photos. Of the city skyline, of the Wasatch Mountains one drives through to get there, of the massive shallow pan of the lake and its saltbed around its western outskirts, near Tooele. I've had two opportunities thus far to do it, and I passed it up. Hopefully next time through I'll think to take pics. Usually I stop in Tooele anyway because it had a streak of really cheap gas (this time through, it didn't) so it wouldn't even be that far out of the way.

But the entire stretch of 100 miles from Tooele to Wendover on the border is a desolate waste. It's the Bonneville salt flats that was once the bottom of an inland sea; nobody I'm aware of lives out here. I'm not even sure that you could buy land out here, in fact. There's a random turnoff for a military area I've never heard of, but that's about it. (Or maybe I have: there were whispers when I was a kid that whatever had been at Area 51 was moved to an unlisted base in Utah. If I wanted to keep a secret away from people, I can't think of a more desolate place in the lower 48 than the Bonneville flats. But I digress.)

When you look at a map of the western part of America, it's a bunch of straight lines for the most part that look like they have little relation to anything on the ground. But from the interstate, the Utah-Nevada border looks perfectly natural. On one side is a small town on the western edge of the Bonneville flats, and on the other side begins the sagebrush-dominated ecosystem of the rest of the Great Basin. It seems entirely possible that the border was determined by the flats. In any case, you can see the border from miles away. On one side, a sober town with a significant fraction of Mormons going about their sensible lives. On the other side, GLOWING NEON DRUGSEX SIN BIG OR GO HOME. Casinos are a fundamental part of modern Nevada, for better or worse, and their gaudy tastelessness is a design feature meant to draw in wayward greenbacks. It didn't work on me, but I did stop at the first stop in Nevada anyway just to take a picture.

After the border crossing came a drive I learned well going back and forth from Montello last year. The Pequop Mountains line the east of my valley, and in places they are as scenic as anything you could ever hope to see in Colorado (don't tell the bourgeoisie). In the middle of my valley is the easternmost stretch of the Pequops, what I affectionately refer to as the "outquopping." Living in a desert does funny things to your sense of humor. And after coming down through that last outquopping, you find yourself passing through Wells, NV, the nearest year-round inhabited town to Tobar, NV.

I opened up a PO Box in this town instead of distant Elko like I had last year; I can probably dispense with many trips in that direction this year. And then I set off to the south, past the turnoff where I lost April, past the gate where I met her, past the center of the ghost town, to see my homestead in the distance.

How did it turn out? Find out in my next post; I'm at the truck stop right now writing up stuff for the next week. I'm trying to adjust to a creative production schedule out here under these conditions, and it's going to take a sec to work out a "new normal." But for the moment, suffice it to say that I'm usually only in range of wifi over the weekend, giving me limited time to do any research or Googling for a given post. I wrote most of the big weighty texts on the bookshelf under similar conditions last year, so I'm sure it'll mostly be a matter of building it into my routine rather than a question of possibility.

I've got at least two other post ideas about the homesteading lined up, as well as a scholarly historical article I've had in mind for a while that I've been meaning to research and write. I've also got to do some research so I can get back to doing art again, because, y'know, Patreon subscribers keep this project afloat. If all this entire collective ever amounts to is a shack in a desert where I can do art rent-free, it'll still have been worth it. I finished Missions to Mars before I left Omaha, and now I kinda miss doing art in physical media. I brought my supplies with me though, so we'll see what happens.