Border Inn

I used to have this idea for a movie/comic where this guy finds a hidden valley. The valley is a desert pan basin. In the middle is a single adobe house underneath some scattered fluffy cumulus clouds. The clouds never move. The guy goes up to the house and there doesn’t seem to be anyone living there. The house has some small horizontal windows but they are translucent and covered with beads of water on the inside. There is a faint humming emanating from inside the house. The guy notices that the clouds don’t seem to be going anywhere so he plants a stick in the ground at the edge of one of the shadows. The shadows of the clouds do move, but trace exactly the same path as that of the stick. Then they guy leaves, blah blah, he comes back weeks later and everything is the same. He finally decides to break into the house. The door of the house is some kind of super industrial iron door so he breaks a window which is large enough to crawl through. I never figured out what happened after that, but i'm sure it was something really bad.


There is no real way for me to post this any smaller.

Ttraveling on Utah State Highway 21 I passed through some wide basins that closely resemble that valley I was imagining. The route is a great starting point if you wanted to do a meditative black and white photo essay on emptiness and timelessness. The roads are straight for incredibly long distances across empty flat basins before climbing over high ranges of mountains that are hard to remember. Now I understand some of those old stories about miners who found preposterously grand gold veins but then could never find the mountain again when they returned later to start the mine.


An old house in the historic town of Junction, Utah.

I had been considering one of two separate routes to get to Baker Nevada, but while traversing the Wasatch Range on a dirt road i stopped to film a timelapse of some pretty clouds moving over quaking aspen. Filming a timelapse takes 10 to 20 minutes depending on how fast the clouds are moving. During this time a guy came walking up to me from a distant cabin in the woods. He walked waaay across the field. That makes for an awkward moment. At what point do you officially greet someone who is walking straight towards you for 6 minutes? I'll have to remember to ask the people at the Mongolian travel agency about that.

The man turned out to be the sheriff of a nearby town. It was his day off, so he was holding a tall budlight instead of a gun. He looked kinda like Tommy Lee Jones, and he had a little dog with a red kerchief around it's neck. We talked for a while and i mentioned my plans. He told me that the road i was considering was a "good" choice because "there's nothin out there, you can just burn through that country." Now that i think about it, he kinda sounded like Tommy Lee Jones too.

I was a bit suspicious about the statement. Was this sheriff setting me up by telling me i could "burn through that country" just so he could call up his buddy and tell him he was sending some jackass his way? Fortunately he was telling the truth.

Images from Fishlake National Forest in the Wasatch Mountains.

It’s the Basin and Range area which makes up all of Nevada, as well as a large portion of Central Utah and Eastern California. I’ve been through parts of it before, but this drive seemed to have bigger, flatter basins. And it was on a remote road with no services or towns for 83 miles. The towns that did exist, Milford on the south end and Garrison on the north, were literally on their way to becoming ghost towns. Milford had far more people than Garrison, and even a new high school, but everyone was impoverished and life was hard. Those people and their lives made for some good pictures, if you are the kind of person who can do that stuff.

I was going to stay in one such settlement called Baker, which is the main entry point to get into Great Basin National Park. Here’s a funny thing about Baker, IT HAS NO FOOD. I was going to check into one of the two motels and the (eccentric to say the least) manager, who was also the bartender, told me the rooms were $54. Wow, that’s great, i thought (although I was already getting scared about the condition of the rooms based on what the office looked and smelled like). I asked where I could get some food and he said "There’s not any". I mentioned a restaurant/grocery I thought I saw about a block away on the other end of town. He said it was closed for the season. Apparently all anyone needs to survive in Baker Nevada during the season of the year when it’s cooled down to 90 degrees, is liquor. There was plenty of that.


The Border Inn as viewed from Utah.

So I asked him where there was some food and he said at the Border Inn. I asked him how to get there. It was 15 miles away, which didn’t take long driving 100 mph in search of food. I mean seriously, hotels but now food? I could write an entire blog on just that statement. They only have food when it is the "season for eating". To be fair, there are some small towns that have no need for a public serving restaurant, but give me a break, Baker is listed on about 4 tourism guides i have for Nevada as being a tourist destination.

The Border Inn is a truck stop with rooms, literally on the border of Utah/Nevada. On one side of the Inn you can gamble in slot machines and on the other side you can buy much cheaper Utah gas. It is the best of both weird worlds. But the best thing is that they have food there! The Border Inn is at the bottom of one of those huge desert basins, and you can see 100 miles to nothingness. In fact, the valley is supposed to have the clearest air of the lower 48. It’s next to another sign that say “next services 83 miles”.


Baker is 200 miles away from Las Vegas as the crow flies. There is absolutely no water to spare anywhere in the area.

Incredibly the rooms there were only $37 a night. The room was only partially as I feared. It DID have wood paneling walls and the associated furniture, and of course a framed picture of an American Bald Eagle flying through a dramatically lit forest in a mountain area. It DID NOT smell bad, it was clean except for constantly appearing moths that I found myself stepping on. It had what looked like a newly renovated bathroom, except for the old yellow tub.

The air conditioner worked great, even though it looked like someone had their head bashed into it 15 times. After being outside roasting in the sun from dawn till dusk i felt like crawling into a vampire's coffin, but after a short while i smelled all kinds of nasty fumes and started to seriously worry that the building was on fire. So I went outside around back and saw that there was indeed a fire. It wasn’t the building on fire but a couple of big piles of random materials, many of which shouldn’t be burnt, in shallow depressions just burning away. There was a lawn sprinkler on one of them, making it smokier. I got closer and could see that at least some of the stuff that was on fire looked like what I had imagined my bathroom would have looked like if it hadn't been newly renovated, there was even a ceramic toilet in the fire. I guess the renovations were more recent than I had assumed.


Next up for burning of fire number two, a camper shell....

Ironically I got the best nights sleep, there at the truck stop, of my entire vacation. There were no jets overhead or drunk partiers who stay up till 3 in the morning, or old people who love to get up at 4 in the morning and start having long conversations with their deaf friends in Orlando, or honking trains, or screaming elk or barking dogs. The highway sat completely silent for 10 minutes at a time and I couldn’t hear anything anyway, possibly do to shielding from several layers of double long semi trucks and another long building of motel rooms.

Also, the dining room there was very clean and actually well decorated for what they had to work with. The food was cheap in price, hardy and of big tasty portions. It made me feel like driving a semi for 600 miles. There was a girl, possibly Shoshone, who was getting way too much attention, and possibly just a tiny fraction more than she wanted, from the two guys she knew in the area. They had nothing to do but hang out in the restaurant while she worked. Each one would take turns vying for her attention and asking her out on a date in a roundabout way. She may have been the only girl their age within 80 miles.



At the table right in front of me i got to listen to these two old time miners talking about their mines. One of them seemed to be a hermit and it was the first time in a month he had seen anyone. He said he had this dumptruck and there were some days he put up to 90 miles on it just picking a load up from his mine and dumping a short distance away at his sorter or mill or whatever he had. It was interesting to listen to how their days went. It would have been neat to go hang out with them for a day. They both seemed constantly consider whether or not to continue with their own private mines or to go to a larger company owned mine somewhere else where they could make more money but would have to be an ordinary worker.

The Way To Windy Wellington

Driving from Tongariro to Wellington we had two roads to choose from, and chose the one that seemed like it would be less crowded. There was virtually no one on the road for 3 hours as we passed through very pretty pastoral landscapes. The road itself was one of the curviest i've ever been on, and made the driving very fun. There was even on e of those very rare sections of road where we were driving on top of a high ridge, with sharp drop offs on both sides of the road. At times it reminded me of a rally racing game, especially since the forests sometimes looked like they were created for a video game, with no underbrush and perfectly spaced trees that all looked exactly the same.


Lots and lots of sheep ranching.


This looked like a fantastic place to swim, and it was warm enough to do so, but Maree's back was killing her and we really didn't know how long we had to go.


Almost everyone in New Zealand is exactly like these guys.


See? The trees look like they'd be in a videogame!

Thompson Pass and Valdez

After leaving McCarthy we ended up getting to the end of the 60 mile dirt road at roughly the same time that we entered the road the day before. We didn't see much at the pass that evening because of typically thick fog and rain, but the next day was perfect, at least at the pass. Valdez was rainy the whole time but seemed to be improving as we left. Kinda strange, but we stayed at a bed and breakfast at a Mexican restaurant called Ernesto's. I was surprised at how good it was.


Me taking a picture of tucked away Liberty Falls


Me taking a picture of can't miss it Bridal Veil Falls


This was at Valdez Glacier, which is the first glacier I've seen where the terminus is a municipal gravel quarry. You have to admit though, glaciers are great at making gravel.

I knew Valdez was small, but man, it is really incredibly small. It must only be about 1 square mile, and everywhere a non resident would be interested in going is contained within an area the size of about 3 or 4 blocks. It's in a spectacularly beautiful location, which i did not photograph because of the weather. A month later i returned with my brother, but the weather was pretty much the same.


Keystone Canyon is very impressive


The road as it enters Keystone Canyon on the way to Valdez





I had hoped to go hiking at a place called Mineral King Valley but we were turned around because of a flooded road. There were actually numerous flooded roads around Valdez, and now i can say that has become the trademark symbol of this entire summer.


On the way up to Thompson Pass from Valdez


Worthington Glacier dominates the pass. I really like this one.



This was taken right next to the Alaska Pipeline which also crosses over Thompson Pass. It was underground, I guess as protection from avalanches, but you can see it at the very far left side of the photo, above the leftmost snowfield in the foreground.

The Road to McCarthy

A few weeks ago we went to Wrangell St. Elias National Park. It's the largest park in the United States, and one of the least visited. Annually, the park receives 50,000 visitors. In comparison, the south rim of the Grand Canyon can receive 50,000 visitors in as little as 3 days.

Part of the reason it's not visited is that it's just not easy to get there. There are only two roads into the park and almost no trails are accessible from them. We went along the south road. To get there we drove 3.5 hours from Anchorage, then started on the 60 mile dirt road, which took another 2.5 hours by itself and dead ends 1/2 a mile from the town of McCarthy.




This narrow, one lane bridge is nearly 300 feet over the river.











This old rail tressel was originally 800 feet long and was built in 8 days in the middle of winter. The road actually is just built upon the old railway grade, and as a result has earned a bad reputation for puncturing tires with old railroad spikes that sometimes stick out of the surface. The last few years they have worked hard on the road to improve it, and now a few car rental companies will even allow their cars to be driven on it.







The road to McCarthy ends here, at the headwaters of the Kennicott River, which flows out of the merging of the Kennicott and Root glaciers.



Throughout our trip I was very surprised at the poor job the park service does at managing access to the park, and the lack of knowledge of the rangers there. At the end of the road there is no park service parking transportation. You have to pay a local resident of McCarthy a daily fee to park your car, and there's no way around it because it's the end of the road and there's really nothing along the road until you get to the end of it. After parking you have to pay to camp there, or pay another resident for a ride into town or Kennicott, or walk into town where you will have to pay for somewhere to stay, or walk 5 miles to the nearest free park service campground. This footbridge leads across the river to McCarthy, about a 1/2 mile walk. We chose to camp at a closed campground for free, which happened to be right next to the "parking lot" campground, where they charged $20 a night.



Until the mid 1990's you could only cross by getting in a rope suspended cage and hand cranking yourself across the river using this old tram.