Red Rock climbers

We had some friends from Texas visiting last week. They didn’t want to go down to the Strip so we took them out to Red Rock Park. They’ve been camping their way across the Southwest in national park campgrounds, but still would rather see more dirt and rocks than glitter and neon (well, no more neon, it’s all LEDs now). With the storm systems moving through we still have a lot of clouds.


There were quite a lot of people out there enjoying the cooler weather. Most of the rocks had people climbing on them. Calico is the most colorful


Right next to those are more distinctive stripes.


Over by the quarry they were down closer.


Still a bit too slippery for us to try, we were all satisfied just watching.

Mt. Charleston flowers

Last week we went up to Mt. Charleston again for a picnic. It’s a lot cooler there, two patches of snow were still high up in the shade. We weren’t that high, but did have a nice picnic next to a small stream and walked along the nature trail. It’s still a mountain desert, with very little water besides the winter snows, so the vegetation is not very lush. The trees are scrawny and the weeds very low, but there were some flowers scattered here and there.






It is pretty remote down from the road, with no traffic and hikers that wander through every few years or so. There are some streams, and it looks like some Californians have moved in. Last week a police helicopter searching for a lost hiker found something else: several acres of marijuana plants growing. The TV news yesterday showed scenes of an assortment of workers hiking down to the location, finding a complex drip watering system fed by some springs and evidence that the growers had been there for several years. The estimate is of several million dollars street value of plants, which will be cut down, hauled out by helicopter and burned. I don’t know why they go through all that trouble, people had planned on burning the plants anyway, just in smaller quantities wrapped in paper.

Mt. Charleston

We went up to Mount Charleston one Sunday to see just how much cooler it was up there. Mt. Charleston is the big hill just northwest of Vegas, a forty five minute drive from our house. The peak is around 12,000 ft (3,700 meters) high, and gets a fair amount of snow in the winter. There is a small ski and snowboarding area with lifts, which is scheduled to greatly expand over the next few years. You can gamble down on the warm strip (winter highs are usually close to 80f (26c)) and then go up and play in the snow.

Driving up to the parking area near the ski lifts we can see that even though it’s the end of July there is still snow up here. Temperatures were about 30 degrees cooler than down in the valley.


There are a lot of walking trails through the pines. Even though it is high and they get snow in the winter it is still a desert, the trees are not as large as other mountains have, there are no low growing bushes, the grass is sparse, but still different than the open flats far below.


There are lifts up the slope, the skiing is nothing like the big ski resorts but it is close to town.




Trails are open, most are fenced to keep people off of the surrounding hills as feet tend to kill the plants, resulting in a lot of erosion due to the poor soil and slow plant growth.


Most of the upper mountain is rock, with no paths to the top. I haven’t heard anything about it being a big climbing area.


There are picnic areas, but due to the dryness and high fire danger most of the summer open fires are not permitted. Bring along sandwiches, or a camping stove if you want to cook something. It’s a cool diversion for summer activities.

Small things

Lots of interesting things going on around town. Last weekend was a big memorabilia auction, with stuff from Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe and others. Most things brought ten times the estimated prices, or more. There was one of Michael’s sparkly gloves, an x-ray of Marilyn’s chest, and enough stuff to keep the auction going for three full days.

Our temps have leveled out to our summer normals, high today will be 107f (41c) with nighttime lows of 80f (27c), and sunshine sunshine sunshine. The water temperature in our pool is up to the 93f that we like, so it is very pleasant to float around in the evening and watch the sun set and the bats come out. I guess we are adapted, as last Friday we went to our local Sonic drive in, just a few blocks from our house, rolled the windows down, and enjoyed the sunset and the carhops skating by. Oh, temp, yes, it was 99f and we were enjoying the cool weather as we ate burgers and ice cream shakes.


Nevada continues to add to its first place standings, we are now number one in unemployment rate in addition to being number one in home foreclosures. And new number show we are number one in high school graduation rate, that is number one in number of dropouts, as it seems that less than 42% of students entering high school end up graduating. The next lowest state was New Mexico, with a rate of 55% - big difference. Part of the reason is probably our transient rate (number of students changing schools) which also is number one in the nation, around 40% of students moving between schools each academic year. Iowa, New Jersey and Wisconsin graduation rates are over 80%. This probably relates to having tourism as our major industry, as most jobs in hotels and casinos do not require much education. A new boutique hotel recently opened, and of the 150 advertised positions none of them specified an education level, being maids, cleaners and manual laborers. It must be hard for a student to be motivated if there are few examples of why an education is important.

Our legislature seems to be following along with the lack of education stuff, recent discussions are leading to a new law requiring repair shops, smog stations and oil change locations to check tire pressure when vehicles come in. I know that having properly inflated tires is important, but how many restrictive laws are required to save us from ourselves? Do they have so much time that they can ignore the huge budget shortfalls, high unemployment and schooling rates that they can talk for hours about tire pressure? Reminds me of congressional sessions investigating drug use in athletes while ignoring all our national problems.

Outside our kitchen window the sage is blooming again. In the background are white and red olianders.

Road trip - Ely to Vegas

We’ve driven up to Portland from Last Vegas to visit our daughter and granddaughter twice now,driving due north from Las Vegas, up into Idaho, then heading west to Portland. The total drive is about 1,000 miles, and we spend one night at a hotel in Twin Falls, Idaho where we have dinner and rest a bit. The speed limits out here are usually 65 or 70 on the open road, with all of the Nevada portion on two lane asphalt like I’ve documented before, where you drive in a straight line without turning the wheel for an hour, then a few curves, then another hour of straight. In Idaho and Oregon we are on interstate, which is usually two or three lanes in each direction with a big center divider. That portion is more interesting, with lots of ups and downs and curves, with trees and rivers to look at instead of flat desert terrain.

Driving back this last time we took a different road for the last segment, Ely to Vegas. We drove on a road a little to the west of our normal route, on the other side of a mountain range along what’s called the Extraterrestrial Highway. It’s named that because it is near Area 51, the supposed site of space ship landings, and close to the Air Force secret test range, where new planes and weapons are developed. It’s been a while since I’ve driven across country, so my memories of open Kansas and the Midwest are not too current, but driving in Nevada desert country is unlike most areas of the US. The first indications that things are a little different are the signs just as you leave Ely: ‘Next gas 100 miles’, providing a little reminder that perhaps you should go back and visit one of those half dozen gas stations before continuing onward. There also isn’t too much going on around you either.


Sorry, the ‘next gas’ sign flew by too quickly for me to get a photo of it. This day was a little unusual for us in that there were clouds in the sky, and we even got to drive through a bit of rain. I’m always talking about how dry it is out here, and according to today’s paper our precipitation so far this year (and it is September already) is 1.28 inches. Usually the summer is our monsoon season, with thunderstorms coming up from Mexico, but this year was pretty barren as far as rain. Again, in eight months we have had an inch and a quarter total of rain. Our humidity is usually around 3%, mostly because of evaporation from everybody’s lawns. This week we have unusual hazy conditions, because of all the smoke blowing up a few hundred miles from the California fires (sorry to everybody out there).

During the drive we would periodically see a house or two off in the distance.


This one was in the middle of a little rain shower, you can see some of the rainfall against the sky. I know some people don’t like neighbors, this guy probably complains about all the traffic on the road we are on which is about two miles from his house. We probably passed two cars or a truck every hour or so on this road, and as you can see from the first picture we weren’t really in a line of cars going in our direction either. Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Ely, I see part of the road we were on is officially labeled ‘The Loneliest Road in America’ by Life magazine.

Some of the mountains just north of Ely still had snow on them. The general elevation around here is about 6,400 feet above sea level, so I guess Ely, Nevada ties Boulder, Colorado for being called the ‘mile high city’. The snow on these mountains is probably around the 12,000 foot level, running alongside the Great Basin National Park. You can see how green the desert has gotten because of the summer rains.


After the 100 miles of no gas we came upon a small town in the midst of a thunderstorm.


I don’t know the name of it, there probably weren’t 50 houses spread out in town and on the surrounding farms, but there was some farming down in a river valley (which only had water on the surface when it rained). I might like living on a bigger lot, but it sure is nice to be five minutes away from a supermarket and restaurants, not a two or three hour drive like these folks (and that’s to Ely, population 4,041 not Vegas). Eventually our road ended up driving through a hard rock ridge where the periodic river had carved a canyon.


The road followed the bottom of the canyon, rather than somehow going over the ridge. This was a pleasant change from all the flat, so B ended up taking quite a few photos as we drove through.








And then down back into the flats, and another two hours into Vegas. So there it is, the last quarter of our road trip back down from Portland into Las Vegas. I’ve got some shots of Twin Falls; have to pull those together as well.