Well, the six day forecast from three days ago was pretty much wrong about its second half. It appears that I am going to meet up with weather by the end of today.
I have driven this thing in snow successfully. Last December, on the way back to Reno after picking it up in Oregon, I foolishly took the long, scenic way around the west side of Eagle Lake rather than nice easy way straight down the east side, and found myself on a curvy, hilly, snow-covered mountain road for 5-6 miles. I kept my momentum going up the hills, I didn’t go too fast going down the hills, and got to Susanville uneventfully, which is all you can ask for.
However… that little episode in Vermont of getting utterly immobilized on grass and wet leaves and a nearly imperceptible grade kinda freaked me out about the prospect of getting into slippery weather in the middle of nowhere. And there is a front coming through.
The forecast is for rain starting tonight, all day tomorrow, ending tomorrow night, snow level 6,500-7,500′. Which means that if I was at last night’s campground tonight I would be in snow! Sure enough, by noon there are dark clouds and it is very windy on my green-dotted plain. I have to grip the steering wheel with both hands at all times and knock about 15 mph off my speed, cuz my tall skinny vehicle is jerkin and rockin. No steering with my knee while I fold a map or plug the speaker jack into the iPad on this day! I’m looking at the elevation of the passes on my routes forward, and thinking about waking up in a snowy campground, which is making me start to think that this could be a motel night. I haven’t had a shower since Texas after all :)
I have a Navajo taco (regular taco on indian bread – quite good) at a not very pleasant restaurant in Springerville, keep driving uphill into the real mountains, where my plains of endless round green balls become a real mountain forest. Then I descend along the Mogollon Rim into the town of Show Low, where I wandered a while looking for a place to stay. It was a pretty expensive and not very user-friendly town, but a little phoning around identified a motel at the right price-point in Payson, 50 miles ahead.
So 3:30-ish, exit Show Low, and start the hour-ish drive to Payson. The little round trees have been getting taller and skinner and more numerous, and soon I am in the standard-issue Ponderosa pine forest that covers a good chunk of the central Arizona highlands. There are lots of campgrounds, but they are all closed for the season. I get an indication of how high this plateau (the Mogollon Rim) is when I leave it. I drop down a long steep grade, and at the bottom, Payson is still at 4,500′, about like Reno!
The occasional motel really hits the spot for me. I have had some pretty deluxe spare bedroom situations on this trip, but you’re always in somebody else’s home. This is my own little world with wifi and a channel changer and a shower, and once I get used to the overpowering smell of cleaning fluids and don’t think of who else was on this bedspread, I enjoy it very much.
Thursday
It was dry when I went to bed, but it is indeed raining this morning, coming down pretty good and steady. I breakfast about 200 yards down the road, then off to Sedona. My external thermometer reads 43 in town,but gets down to 37 a the top of the pass into the next valley. The next valley is the big wide one through which I-17 blasts from Phoenix to meet I-40 at Flagstaff. Near there is a ranger headquarters where I stop for a little travel advice.
The ranger lady scares me off the trip to Sedona, in particular the pass in the Mingus Mountains above Jerome is almost surely getting snowed on today, so I opt for the lower-elevation route directly to Prescott for the night. Everybody else I talked to thought that ranger lady was trippin’, that I would’ve been fine on the Sedona drive, but I took her advice, and will have to catch Jerome, and Oak Canyon and hippy-dippy Sedona on another trip.
I used to pass through Prescott on the way from San Diego to Sedona in the 80’s, and I remember that i liked it, although I don’t really remember anything particular about it except a lot of pine trees, which was a relief in itself after all the desert west of here.
It’s grown since then, duh. First I had to get through a depressing 10-mile traffic jam called Prescott Valley, which appears to be one of those places that started out as a sleepy suburb and somehow grows like a tumor and ends up bigger than the city from which it grew.
But finally I made it through all the stop lights, to actual Prescott, which was still charming after all these years! I went straight to the National Forest office, which turned me on to the White Spar Campground, open all year and a mere four miles away!
I drive over to check it out, pick a nice spot for tonight, then head back to kill a wet afternoon in Prescott. The answer as always was the library. Prescott Library is on a hill with a nice view of the town, and it felt very cozy on this damp day, and I enjoyed my time there.
It’s Thursday night, and the Niners are playing San Diego, with a possible playoff spot on the line. So next task after leaving the library is to walk downtown in the misty rain and identify a good place to eat and watch the game. I find a very busy pub – all of Prescott seems to be out and eating here tonight. Their grilled chicken special was really tasty, as was their hone-brewed IPA, but I am sad to say that I let the bartender talk me into a third beer while watching the late NBA game. We had switched away from the disastrous Niners a while ago.
These months of relatively healthy living have left me a little out of practice on the drinking thing, so when I got back to the campsite I slept the uneasy, tossing and turning sleep of someone who has had too much to drink. I hate that.
Friday
These arid places are a sensory delight on the day after a rain. The dust is washed off everything, the grass seems a little greener, and the smell of the wet sage and juniper and pine is awesome. This campground does a pretty good job of seeming like it’s out in the forest, but there is a lot of road noise, and as I mentioned, I’m only four miles away from downtown Prescott.
In my wanderings last night I had identified the cafe at the Hotel St Michael‘s as my breakfast destination. It’s a lovely wood-paneled, high-ceilinged room right on the corner across from the very impressive Prescott City Hall building. So I drove there, ate my chorizo scramble and did my wifi thing in a very cultured setting! I even dressed up a little bit – I upgraded to one of my two city outfits for the occasion, rather than the same turtleneck I’ve been wearing since Texas!
Then it’s bye-bye Prescott, still a place I like very much. It’s just so …. usable! About ten miles out of town is a fork in the road where I have to decide if I am going to Sedona or not, so I pull over at a pretty lake overlook and figure it out.
The plan is to get to Martha’s by Wednesday night (Christmas eve eve eve), so I have five days to play with. What I would really, really, like to do is head northeast, backtrack and take that super-fun drive over the Mingus Mountains, down into the funky town of Jerome, through Cottonwood, Sedona, the iconic red rock valley of Oak Canyon and end up in Flagstaff. But I don’t. The wet weather is not going away; if anything, it is going to get more intense. I am pretty sure it will be rain rather than snow today, but Flagstaff is very high and cold, and by tomorrow it will very probably be snowing there. I eventually realize the smart play is visit nifty places at 2000-3000′ this time, and save those nifty 5-6,000’ places for a different trip. Sounds so obvious when I just say it, but it took me about three days of stewing around to figure this out.
So instead of northeast to Jerome, I drive straight north to Williams AZ, where I take a dose of I-40 to traverse the relatively boring western half of central Arizona.
My goal is a place called Katherine Landing – a federal campground on Lake Mojave, the southernmost outpost of the Lake Mead Recreation Area. More on all that later. But first I embark on one of those gratuitous hard-driving adventures like I did back in the Everglades. When I-40 turns south at Kingman, it is a very simple matter to drive due west to Bullhead City AZ and my campground, but nooooo, that’s too simple for me! There’s a light-colored curvy line on the map called Historic Route 66 that winds southwesterly through the back country, down to an interesting-looking lake a few miles north of Needles, where I would catch the north-south road along the Colorado to drive back up to Bullhead City.
It is a pretty rough and curvy little road, but not nearly the disaster that the Everglades road was in terms of messing up my van. It takes a winding path up the side of a small mountain, down the backside through some kind of mining operation, through a little podunk of a town that is trying to make itself a tourist destination by having burros wander loose on the streets. It did not work on me! I didn’t stop, but I did have to go very very slow to negotiate my way around one particularly stubborn ass that had plunked his … ass in the middle of Main Street and wasn’t moving.
This little detour was actually pretty fun. The lake was right next to a gigantic power plant, and I didn’t really see it, because it’s surrounded by 15′ tall sawgrass.
Katherine Landing is a big marina for Lake Mojave and is probably really hopping in the summer. The campground is high up the hill from the lake. It was not particularly pleasant or inviting, but I was able to find a reasonably private site – no electrical hookups, so I was watching the sunset come on serenaded by my neighbors’ generators.
I stumble on to a really nice hike for the evening. I head off on a lateral road with the idea that I’ll see a lot more sunset by staying halfway up the incline than I will by walking down to the lake. There is a little hill towards the lake and I walk up it to check out the view. Once there, I see that there is a little trail along the top of this spur heading towards the lake, so I follow that with the idea that might be a great lake vista at the end. There was indeed a great lake vista, but I could see a way to bushwhack my way down to the marina! The marina was completely deserted on a Friday night in December. I walked all the way out to the end to catch the last rays of sunset over the water, then walked back up the hill on the road – very very nice hike.
There was light rain off and on all night.
Saturday
I hung out and enjoyed my quiet (no generators in the morning!) view site till 11-ish, then drove to fine dining at the Bullhead City Ihop. I crossed the Colorado into Nevada. The Laughlin casinos are lined up on my left. They are quite an impressive sight from the Arizona side, but Iknow there’s nothing there for me, so head straight north, through Searchlight, home of Harry Reid, to Lake Mead.
Why am I even going to Lake Mead? The plan of a couple of nights ago was to camp at Valley of Fire State Park or at Echo Marina on Lake Mead. Time, weather and the need for a shower are changing my mind about the camping, but I drive through anyway, because it’s a pretty drive. At one point I was about eight miles from the new Hoover Dam bypass bridge over the Colorado. That bridge is supposed to be really cool, and if I had that day to do over I think I would’ve made that detour, but I wasn’t feelin’ it when that choice point came up.
So onward … over the hill, through Boulder City, along the southern edge of Las Vegas. That little bit was plenty enough Vegas for me, thank you, to SR 160 near Red Rocks and Blue Diamond. I rounded the corner and started heading north towards the very oddly named Parumph, to took a left on Old Spanish Trail, the lonely road to Tecopa Springs.
Tecopa Springs is a very remote and rather odd hot springs campground/resort. I really like it, but it’s just … odd. The springs are segregated by sex – girls go to one bath house, boys to the other. So in the name of cleanliness and hygiene there is forced nudity!
In all public hot springs clothing is required, clothing is optional at some private springs like Harbin and Sierra and is the de facto standard at most primitive hot springs, but this is the only place I ever heard of with nudity required! It’s all good by me, just odd.
The crowd in the men’s pools is mostly old codgers who I think are locals who live holed up in their trailers in the hills around here. The other time I was here I got a strong gay vibe, but this time I decided that I might simply be (over)reacting to the fact that everybody is forced to be naked and unisex. So now I tried out a different model, that instead of gay, these guys were simply the usual mom and pop camping couples, except mom was hanging out (naked haha) in the other building. This new model explained the available data pretty well also, so I am going to re-calibrate my gay-dar on this one :)
Anyway, the pools are in a couple of buildings on one side of the road, and camping is on the other side of the road in a sort of glorified parking lot on the edge of a drainage pond. I picked myself out a nice spot overlooking the pond, excellent sunset view, and was very happy there for the evening.
Sunday
It rained pretty hard last night, which worried me a little. Yesterday, on Old 66 and the Old Spanish Trail and the other dusty little 2-lane roads I drove, I passed about 30 “Flash Flood Area – Do Not Cross when Flooded” signs. Now, for all but 3-4 days a year, those signs just seem mildly ridiculous, but on a day where the blue-black storm clouds are piled high, with a forecast of lots more rain on the way, they aren’t funny at all, and I’m very glad to be listening to the heavy rain with those signs behind me. Of course, there might be more such signs before me also. I’m not diggin’ the idea of being marooned on some lonely hilltop while the water rises in the gullies before and after me. I’ve been stressin’ for the last two weeks about snow in the passes, but now it looks I’ve beaten the snow but Southern California monsoons might get me … go figure!
But Monday morning dawned and it was pleasant and partly cloudy, so those worried thoughts and the urge to get the hell out of there wasn’t quite as urgent as it had seemed in last night’s storm. I had a morning soak with the boys, then drove north to a unsatisfactory yet overpriced meal in Shoshone, and decided to go ahead with my plan to do a tour of Death Valley as long as I’m in the area.
The original plan was to camp in the park, which I’ve never done and want very much to do, but the weather thing still has me spooked enough to keep moving. The new plan is to just do a drive-by, then head over the pass towards Lone Pine and end up on 395 somewhere tonight. And weather events proved that to be a wise decision.
The drive was awesome. The vistas and views and piles of crazy-colored rocks are always scenic, but the very dramatic blue-black sky and tall clouds made it even more so. It had rained here last night, so the dust was washed off everything and it sparkled.
I came into into Death Valley from the southeast, past the Zabriskie Point overlook. I stopped at the ranger station at the oasis for a weather update and bought 3 gallons of incredibly expensive diesel. Then I continued north up the valley to a left to head west towards the pass at Panamint Springs. As I started the climb it started raining. At the bottom of Death Valley (-300 elevation!) the temperature was in the 50’s, but as I kept driving upwards it kept inching downwards. By the time I got to the top of the pass at 4957′ the temp was 41, but thankfully got no lower. The high country felt lonelier than usual and was actually a a little creepy in this powerful weather, but it sure was pretty, and I had a real close-to-god feeling out there all by myself in the unleashed elements, and I still get a little thrill when I think about it.
By the time I got to 395 at Olancha it was basically dark and seriously pouring rain. I did finally got a little dose of the flash flooding that I’ve been worrying about. South of Olancha, 395 becomes big wide 4-lane for the stretch run to San Bernadino, but to get to that I had to negotiate a few miles of the old 2-lane road which follows the contour of the land (i.e. the gullies!) much more closely. Suddenly there were Caltrans trucks, lights a-flashing, were driving back and forth in the gullies, forcing us all to slow down to 10 mph through the 8-10 inches of water that was racing past. I was very glad to get to the other side of that!
It is seriously pouring rain and it is dark. I grab the trusty iPad and google “food“. There’s not much out here, but thankfully there was good enough 3G reception to ask least ask the question. In the next thirty miles or so the only places that google thinks have food are a Subway and a brewery – woo! a brewery! As I’m slogging along through the rain I develop a plan to go to the brewery and ask if I can sleep in the parking lot. I do this and it works like a charm!
I pictured loud TVs and bar food, the classic sports bar, but Indian Hills Brewery turned out to be a sedate, fancy steak house! I start to leave, but gather myself, turn around and pop the question and they say yes! I can sleep in their parking lot so I get with the flow and order a nice $22, 20 oz steak and enjoy myself. It is on a hill overlooking China Lake, so I think the relatively upscale clientele was military/engineer nerds from the air base.
Monday
Wake up, get going, run into snow in Tehachapi, where I stop at the Starbucks for a little wifi, then plug into the mighty US interstate system and just get ‘er done! Bakersfield, I-5, Tracy, Livermore, East Bay, Berkeley, Richmond, San Rafael, Martha’s house = “home”-ish.
It is odd to have the trip be basically over but not really be home. Because of the weather I am here two nights earlier than I said I would be so everyone has to scramble a little bit but it worked out just fine.
Exactly one week later, after a lovely Christmas with the family, I am really home. I think every traveler in the Bay Area came to the same conclusion that I did, namely that Monday was going to have the least bad weather of any day between Christmas and New Years so that would be the day to make a run for it. There was the usual sporadically crappy traffic at the usual spots, Vacaville-Fairfield and east Sacto-Roseville, but usually it’s a pretty simple drive from Auburn to Reno. But not today, there was a thirty-mile stop and go traffic jam around Gold Run. But I did get home!
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