There isn’t a heck of a lot to photograph between Moab, Utah and the mountains of Oregon. Actually, there is but I tend to just drive, drive, drive through it and not stop to enjoy the emptiness of Nevada and northern Utah. I did explore some of it on later trips.
So this post compresses 4-5 days of travel into one post. Pookie and I left Green River (Utah) and headed north through Salt Lake City, where I stopped to buy a “Jeeper’s jack” (called a Hi Lift) for my Jeep and got a few miles into Nevada where I spied an oasis just west of Wells that looked very inviting.
The place is called Welcome. Population one. Now an RV park, I got the impression that it was once a stagecoach stop. Very nice, and the price was excellent. We spent one night.
Here’s a view of the mountain that supplies the oasis’ water.
There is a lake up there, named Angel Lake, with a campground. Someday, I’m gonna hafta go up there when the road isn’t snowed in. I’ll bet it’s nice.
Our next stop was at another Nevada oasis: Virgin Valley in the northwest corner of the state. It’s in a wildlife sanctuary and ponds have been dug to capture the water of the oasis to provide a stopover for migratory waterfowl. And they were migrating right then. Thousands of birds out on the ponds and the air was filled with a cacophony of tweets and chirps and honks that was just joyous. I tried to go to the water’s edge but Pookie kept following me. I couldn’t catch her to put her in the motorhome, and finally gave up, returning to camp.
This is a “boondocking” campground, which means that you’re on your own for water and electricity (but there is a potable water spigot on site - so you can fill your fresh water tank). And I found out that my house batteries were shot. I ran out of power in the middle of the night and couldn’t run the generator until morning because there were other people camping there. I took this shot of camp before leaving.
It’s not a pretty place, but Pookie absolutely loved that sagebrush. She could wander around in it for hours, hidden from predators and also hidden from her prey.
I wanted to spend another night to have time to go see the thousands of birds, but with no electrical power I had to move on.
We arrived in Klamath Falls, several days too early for my son’s schedule. He spent an afternoon giving me a nice tour in his Jeep in the hills above Klamath lake, after which I was on my own. Here’s the view from there:
After which I decided to test my Jeep on the road up to the top of Pelican Butte. When I got stopped by a snow bank, I took this shot of Mt. McLoughlin:
After which I had a filthy, expensive chore to take care of.
This is one of the original batteries that had come with the motor home. Since the house has two of them, I replaced them with golf cart batteries (which have to be installed in pairs). They hold quite a bit more power than regular RV batteries.
It ran me more than three hundred bucks.
To be continued…
Replacing batteries has become outrageously expensive these days. But seems worth it for all the places you visited. Summers in that part of the country might be the best combination of weather and scenery of anywhere else I've visited.
The ground in your picture of Virgin Valley looks very familiar. In my travels through Nevada and California deserts, it seemed to be the default constituent of the ground. Brings back some good memories. That's some ugly batteries! You're fortunate to not have lost an alternator as a result.