Colorado Bound

Stardate: 7.16.2010

On the Road Again.

Yesterday Susanne and I departed Modesto for points East. We've been planning this run for a while, since her friend Olivia told us she wanted us to come to Colorado back in early June when she visited. Unlike our Artwalk, we are driving this time. We finished packing in the morning and headed out around eleven thirty taking the US99 to the CA120 East and headed for the Mountains. At Sonora we switched to the 108 East and traded oak for pine and fir, following the asphalt path deep into the heart of God's country. In these mountains Earth and Spirit are close to the surface. The Forest creatures more at home than most humans among the trees, hummus and granite. I love it here. If I were not so tied to the hurly-burly of human interaction, to the networks and the nodes, I might just retreat up into these hills forever.

But I can't do that, at least not yet. I am the Rhetorical Boy, the Electric Gypsy, and there is no net access here—Not even cell service. So, the mountains call loudly from the plain, and I go, but then the net starts calling, and after a few days I am drawn back into it's wwweb of facebooking, YouTubian, Blogging, Googling, Yahooooooo madness. One of these days mobile satellite uplinks will fall into the realm of affordability for the impoverished vagabond, or I will fall into some serious money, the question will become moot, and I will be able to live in the high places full-time without giving up my electric umbilical. Until then, these brief adventures sooth and renew my soul.

When we came up here for Memorial day weekend we camped on the West side of the Sierra crest, so this time we decided to continue on over the Sonora pass and camp a night in the Eastern watershed. The real High Country (over seven thousand feet, where the Aspens start mixing in with gnarled old pines and the trees thin out) is breathtaking. I feel the spirit world so strongly here, as if the bones of the earth push the spirit ahead of them into the thinning air. The scent of coniferous trees, birdsong, the rush and gurgle of the water running merrily by as the car strains in low gear striving for the crest at twenty miles an hour with the jagged peaks rising around us, and pockets of snow and ice still melting into the river in the middle of July. We stopped for a while to admire the Middle fork of the Stanislaus river where it is bridged at nine-thousand feet. The river runs deep through a channel carved through the center of an immense granite mountain shoulder, clear and turbulent among the boulders and the trunks of great trees that try to slow it's headlong decent towards the valley now fifty miles below in the west.

The twin bridges are inspiring also, a marvel of human achievement, the old bridge of wood, huge beams growing at odd angles out of the rock below, is now closed to vehicle traffic which takes the reinforced concrete path just upstream, and it is hard to imagine how either was built in this place. I take short videos all day so I can share some of this majesty with my digital friends, but in this case, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but the awesome silence with which we greet the landscape cannot be communicated in either. I stood upon the stone, feet planted and arms raised high like a wizard with his staff (mine is a Eucalyptus branch, flash dried in the fire that burned my boyhood home, carved and sanded smooth—I gave Susanne one much like it), calling the lightening, and I prayed for God to show me what to do next, and to continue to provide me with sustenance. Susanne smiles like the sun at everything and radiates joy in the environment.

Though she is a bit tense driving on these narrow, steep, winding roads that we share with Harleys and White Semi-tractors towing huge red shipping containers. WTF are those things doing up here? I asked myself, this is NOT a shipping corridor. When we crested the pass and started down I may have got an answer to that. Looking out to the East from the crest of the past we find the way east much drier, the peaks form a dividing line between the fertile valley of California and Nevada's dessert.

Stardate: 7.18.2010.

Anyway, We camped that first night at Sonora Bridge campground ($17.00, I hate paying to camp out, but it was a nice place with beautiful views and a friendly campground host). We had Chicken tacos for dinner, played a partial game of chess that was interrupted by a thunderstorm, and retreated to our respective tents to read and sleep. Saturday morning, I slept in while Susanne went for a bike ride, then took her sketchbook out to a viewpoint and drew the mountains, and apparently stopped and drank coffee with some other campers who told her that they'd been coming to this campground for forty years and that this was the first time it had ever rained in the summer.

After I finally dragged my ass out of my bedroll, we went for a hike, broke camp, and drove on down the mountain. We passed the USMC Mountain Warfare School (where I suspect the big trucks came from) and then hit the 395 North to Carson City. Carson City seems a nice town, at least the people we ran into were friendly, So we hung at Starbucks for a while to plan our next leg, stocked up on ice, water, and food, filled the tank, and headed East on the US 50. That night we camped at a reservoir ($15.00), Where the wind near sundown was enough to make tent stakes mandatory. The wind died with the sun. Susanne went swimming and I waded, then we had a cold dinner. We both had a hard time sleeping and after two or three hours sleep, ended up on a blanket outside the tents looking up at the stars and talking through much of the night. We went back to sleep around dawn and slept for a couple hours.

We both swam in the morning and then continued on our way. We noticed that the right front tire is nearly bald and decided to get tires. We stopped at a Walmart, but the wait would have been too long for our itchy feet, so we continued on until we hit Austin. Nice little Mountain Town, advertises itself as the Turquoise capitol. There we got coffee and fries, and found out that the lady at WalMart really did not know what the hell she was talking about when she gave us directions. Furthermore, either I was mistaken about our route, or google maps has the Berlin-Itchyasaur State Park 100 miles north of where it actually is, so we would not be going there.

On the way we ran across the shoe tree, the damnedest thing. A huge tree, growing up out of the middle of an arroyo five miles from the nearest building, and upon this tree hangs a veritable plethora of shoes. Not just shoes: sandals, boots, a pair of ice skates, flip-flops, sneakers, a pair of crutches, ski-boots, and more. They hang in pairs, they hang in bunches like Daliesque grapes, they are stuck in the forks of branches, and the ones that missed (or have fallen) are mounded around the base of the tree. In a life full of movement, adventure and the abuse of controlled substances, this tree is one of the most surreal things I have ever seen.

So, from Austin, we headed North on the Nevada 305 towards Battle Mesa and the I-80. We quickly realized that we were not going to get tires at WalMart that day because it was nearly five, and that is when the tire shop closes on Saturday, so we began looking for a good place to camp. We found a BLM site at a place called Mill creek, about twenty miles south of Battle Mountain. I don't see how anyone ever ran a mill off of this creek, it's awful small, but there are trees and such. It was also totally deserted, and free. Yay! We had our pick of sites, and I started the fire for dinner, and began food prep while Susanne set up the tents and such. Pork tenderloin, charbroiled over a mesquite fire, potatoes fried with onions and garlic, and slaw with a lemon vinaigrette. Yummy, dinner was great, and the process of cooking it quite interesting under the circumstances. I'll never forget making that meal...

After dinner, we read until dark by the stream, then retreated once more to our respective tents. This morning, we got up about eight and went for a hike up the creek Lot of cow shit out there, the rangelands start about five-hundred feet upstream. Don't want to drink this water, but the little canyon is pretty enough, and we saw Jack rabbits, lizards, Robins, and various other critters.

Back at camp, Susanne made corn dumplings with sausage, cheddar and blueberries in them. Sounds odd, but they were damn good. Now it is time to pack up again and head on down the road.