Driving Days

Wherein Moominmama travels over a thousand miles to get from one mountain range to another and sees the strange remnants of former lakebeds...

Photos don't always tell the entire truth. Take the photo above, a lovely sunset over Utah Lake near Provo. Moominmama made arrangements to stay overnight at Lake Shore RV Park, next to the Lindon Marina. Sounds nice, huh?  

I was parked in a boat storage lot, along with several sun-scorched and road-weary old RVs. The water behind us was soupy and smelled bad. Mosquitos and other bugs were numerous, as were the spiderwebs seeking to capture them. In a stroke of marketing genius, this town is called Vineyard! Besides cottonwoods and pond scum, the only plants I saw were a natural gas plant and a solid waste treatment plant.

When Moominmama has to get from point A to point B, she often doesn't research closely but makes snap judgments about where to stay along the route. After the cool of the Rockies, it seemed wise to get somewhere with electricity to run air conditioning in the Salt Lake valley. That's why an RV park made sense, and a marina sounded like a great opportunity to be near the water.

For reasons that made sense to me at the time, I wanted to get from the Rockies and back toward the Sierras in short order now that summer is here. This required a four-day drive across Utah and Nevada. The goal has been to get to Castle Crags State Park in northern California, a state park described to me as a smaller, less crowded Yosemite. By the time you read this, I hope to have arrived!

Driving days are often a matter of just eating up the miles and listening to podcasts, but Moominmama does stop on occasion to see a few sights. Driving west of Salt Lake City, the scenery turned surreal. Brilliant white plains stretched all the way to the mountains -- not with snow but salt.

Moominmama had found the Bonneville Salt Flats, the remnants of an ancient inland lake that has since evaporated. It's now know for various world land-speed records. The first world land-speed record was set on the salt flats in September of 1935 by Sir Malcom Campbell with a time of just over 301 miles per hour. That has since been broken multiple times. The world land-speed record is now over 760 miles per hour. Getting up to those speeds, maintaining them for one mile and then slowing down require long, flat, unvaried surfaces like this one, now quite the roadside attraction!

But Moominmama's favorite roadside discovery were the tufa formations of Lovelock, Nevada. Moominmama heard about these and researched how to get to them. These are evidence of another ancient water body, Lake Lahontan.

According to my research, these tufa are formed when calcium carbonate in the water infiltrated algae and other underwater plant life, turning to limestone. Not millions of years old like most fossils, these just date back to the last ice age.

There are a wide variety of shapes and sizes, blobs and stalks and strange caves you can imagine underwater. You almost expect these organic curves to gently undulate except they are hard as well, rock. 

These are definitely among the stranger stones I've seen, but Lovelock has many, including a tufa cave a longer distance from the highway than I was prepared to go.

Mooominmama was still focused on making time. I had better luck with campsites after the first night, camping for free on federal land in a grove of cottonwood trees in Nevada. There was even a bubbling brook to sing me to sleep. A lovely California family joined me that evening, so besides the brook, I also got serenaded by young children singing Disney's "Frozen" at the top of their little lungs! Such joy!

Tonight, I am 160 miles from my destination. I have made it into California (back to high gas prices!) at a campground with a view of a watery remnant of aforementioned Lake Lahontan. Honey Lake is a very shallow water body that can extend as much as 60,000 acres or go dry entirely! 

Only 2- to 15-feet deep at most, it goes dry some years and fills up other years depending on precipitation. The lake can't really be used for fishing or boating so there's no public access. Today, the high winds are churning up the silt in the water so it looks more like sand. I'm taking the campground owner's word that it's water, so here I am, camping by remains of a prehistoric lake that once stretched all the way to where I started my day in Lovelock.