Kent Chamberlain and the Front Range Quest

Not long ago, I took a trip to Denver. A friend from Nebraska had stuff to bring to me, and it was too much stuff for him to bring in one trip. So we decided to meet up in Denver, which was about as far as he could travel between workdays.

Unlike previous trips, I tried a new path this time. I went south towards Ely, then drove across Highway 50 to I-70. This was the first day. After hopping on the interstate at Salina, I trundled on in the darkness until I found a rest area.

Utah got rest areas, y'all. Utah got the best rest areas in America. They have wifi and they look like pic related. This trip is going to be multiple posts long and chock full of pictures, and Utah having excellent rest areas is a big chunk of why. The morning I woke up east of Salina, I hung out for an hour or so checking the news before I went about my day. Considerate Mormons are considerate. I love Utah so much. Fix your weed laws and it might actually be a New Jerusalem.

There are several places along the road that aren't even rest areas per se; they have the basic bathroom facilities that Nevada considers a full-blown rest area, but they're mainly just a place to park and appreciate the view. Local Native artists also sell their wares there, and the state doesn't seem to bother them, which is cool.

Homestead and garden update: 6/27/2021

I promised an update on my homestead a while back, and then went radio silent. It was because of several reasons: apparently Blogger causes my laptop to overheat so I can't use it easily unless I can go hang out in an air-conditioned place long enough to write up some posts, and even though I can code HTML, I have to finish my posts online because I can't code for the images offline. I've also been super busy with the homestead, which, dun dun dun...

...did survive.

First of all, foremost of all, let's talk about the garden. I took this set of pictures right before I left for a trip to Denver, which I'll schedule to post sometime later this week. (I'm writing all of this on Friday, trying to work my way through a vast set of photos.)

I was worried that leaving this garden alone for a week would result in some dead crops. But outside of a couple of the more weakly-rooted mustard leaves, that didn't happen. Instead, the crops seemed to take the opportunity to spread their roots deep to suck out the remaining moisture, and now those huge root structures are helping push them up. So I'm super stoked. Follow me past the jump and see something besides this gorgeous repotted cactus that I tricked into thinking it's raining.

So my foray into mycology. This here is a genuine golden oyster mushroom in a fruiting stage. I'll cut it in a few days, cube up the mass, and fry it with onions to make mushroom sandwiches. I am definitely going to expand my mycological holdings as soon as I have the space to. I'm thinking I might buy some spores and some sawdust, and just grow it on the floor on the walkways. I won't be likely to step on one, and usually the grainmass isn't fruiting so it'll usually be an empty walkway. But I have to build that greenhouse first.

Kent Chamberlain and the Mountain of Gold

For a while now, I've lumped all my adventures in Nevada under the collective heading "Nevada agricultural collectiveposting" because, eh, close enough. Unlike other blogs of mine, I'm trying to keep a handle on the number of labels I post, to make the label feature usable to find different "genres" of posts quickly. My overwintering in Omaha's ending, indeed by the time I finished writing this it already has, and there's several picture sets worth of adventures I've yet to tell, because precious little of it has to do with the homesteading. Instead, it's all got to do with goldhunting, or other various and sundry side quests off in the mountains somewhere. If it vaguely made me feel like Indiana Jones as I did it, it'll go in this section.

When I first packed out to go to Nevada, I came equipped with gold panning equipment and an excellent USGS publication from 1973, Placer Gold Deposits of Nevada, as well as the various maps cited therein, all saved on my phone. I've never panned gold before this, but I've watched a really great Youtube channel on the subject, and studying for my geography minor in a region with a lot of nearby coal, oil, and mineral fields equipped me with a basic knowledge of geology and the processes that cause rocks. Being a historian in the American West also required me to learn about how gold panning works in order to understand its role in the region's history. So I don't think I entered blindly.