Sleeping - at an elevation of 8,000 feet - below the summit of Merritt Mountain was the most pleasant night of sleep we've had in a long time, even nicer than the previous night, perched on the canyon edge, overlooking the South Fork Owyhee River. And, like the previous night, I'd set my alarm for a time of day no one should be awake, ensuring that - at the very least - I'd capture the Earth's shadow as the sun climbed into the sky behind us. It was fabulous to watch the Belt of Venus fade across the horizon, the…
13 CommentsTag: nevada
With a late sunset, it'd been 11:00pm by the time the last of the light faded from the sky and we finally fell asleep, but not before I'd set my alarm for 4:45am so I could catch what I hoped would be a dramatic sunrise on the edge of the serpentine canyon carved by the Owyhee River. Wishing that the darkness had lasted just a little longer, I pulled on my clothes and climbed out of the tent, grabbing every bit of camera gear I could muster. My hope was that that I'd timed the light perfectly - allowing me…
8 Comments
We've been going to the Owyhee for ages. Or at least, "ages" when taken in context of the time that we've been adventuring around the western United States (and Canada). In fact, our very first trip was to Owyhee, a trip that @mrs.turbodb planned on the same weekend in May, nine years ago. In that time - as we've traversed many thousands of miles of road - we've learned much about this wonderland in southeast Oregon, including the fact that it's not limited to Oregon! The Owyhee extend into southwest Idaho and even into northern Nevada. For the first time,…
6 Comments
We'd wrapped up the Arizona Backcountry Discovery Route (AZBDR) in record time, a full day faster than even our most ambitious estimates. On the one hand, it was nice to relax a bit, knowing that we had plenty of time to make it from the Arizona-Utah border near Kanab to our flight out of Las Vegas. On the other, now we were faced with figuring out what to do with our spare time; I hadn't researched any backup plans should a situation like this occur! After a bit of "we could do this," and "we could go see that," we…
6 Comments
Our exit from Big Rocks Wilderness after lunch on Thursday gave us only a few hours in the afternoon -- and a couple hours the following morning - before heading to Las Vegas for our $27 flights home on Spirit Airlines. How Spirit can provide flights for so little money is beyond me, but it has made the decision to leave the Tacoma in Las Vegas even easier - for the cost of a single tank of gas, both of us can fly roundtrip, saving 40 hours of travel time in the process - on the ends of a trip.…
7 Comments
The Pahranagat Valley and its surrounding wilderness' have been my nemesis throughout 2023. I set out in January - nearly a year ago now - to follow the Pahranagat Trail in search of rock art that I'd discovered through the trip reports of other intrepid explorers. Ultimately - and luckily, quickly - I realized that without more information, I was searching for a needle in a haystack, so I headed east and south - to Utah and Arizona - where I discovered some of the most amazing rock art that I was not looking for. Strike one. Determined to succeed…
12 Comments
As was the warning that crackled over the military scanner for one of the most exhilarating moments of the trip, this story is a short one. - - - - - As you may recall, we'd camped as close as we could to a random point in the middle of nowhere Nevada that an internet stranger had shared with me as one that had nearly uncountable - there were so many - low level military flyovers. And again, as you may recall, we were only "as close as we could be" due to the fact that we'd run into the…
21 Comments
Moonlit headframe. We arrived at Nivloc at what appeared to be midnight but was - according to multiple timekeeping devices - only a bit before 8:30pm. Still, even under the bight-as-day moon, we knew better than to poke around this old ghost-town-mine-site in the dark, so we unfolded the tent, read the most boring books ever on our Kindles (me: Bourne Ultimatum, @mrs.turbodb: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent), and climbed into bed as I left the camera snapping one eight-second exposure after the next. I'd hoped to capture some amazing timelapse of…
3 Comments
Hoping to get some photos before the sun was up and the cabin-under-a-rock was lost to the shadows, I set my alarm for too-dark-o'clock, and hit the snooze button a couple of times before finally pulling on my pants and climbing down the ladder to a beautiful morning. Even before the sun was over the horizon, the glow on the granite hillsides was magical. This old water tank caught my eye. Suddenly in a rush against the sun, I scampered up the hillside in search of a location where I could capture the entire camp. This - given the car-sized…
15 Comments
One of the dots I'd hoped to connect on our trip through Nevada was hiking to the top of Boundary Peak in the White Mountains. Boundary is an interesting peak. Appropriately, it sits on a boundary - the state line between Nevada and California. At 13,147 feet, it's the highest peak in Nevada. And hilariously, along the same ridgeline - less than a mile away, and just across the California border - Montgomery Peak rises 298 feet above Boundary Peak, yet Montgomery Peak does not rank amongst the top 100 of California's highest peaks. Sounded like the perfect peak to…
19 Comments
I don't know how cold it was when my alarm went off just before sunrise in the Tobin Range, but despite the fact that we were several thousand feet lower in elevation, it felt colder than waking up at the top of Lamoille Canyon. The fact that the entire tent - and the top comforter - were covered in a thin layer of dew-turned-to-ice probably added to that perception. I knew we wouldn't be getting any sun in our bottom-of-the-canyon location, so instead of dwelling on the wet tent, I found myself hoping that the drone wouldn't complain too much…
19 Comments
It was refreshing 6°F as we emerged from the tent on the first morning of our trip. Without a doubt, @mrs.turbodb's statement the previous afternoon as we pounded away the miles in the warmth of the Tacoma - "We're headed south to the Arctic" - was top of mind. I'd ribbed her at the time - geography is her thing - but there was no question that the trip was off to an auspicious start. So, I'd better give a bit of background on how we ended up here. There isn't any *good* reason to "be" in temperatures like this.…
10 Comments
A few months ago, I headed to Nevada in search of several rock art sites along the Pahranagat Trail. After starting out with a bang in Arrow Canyon, my search in the South Pahroc Wilderness was a total flop, as I didn't find any rock art at all! After popping into the local BLM office for some tips - which they couldn't share - I aborted my plan altogether for an alternate, ultimately amazing, itinerary. Returning home, I had a "brilliant*" idea. Like many other Americans, I watch and read a bit of news here and there, and one of…
16 Comments
From Rainbow Canyon, I'd planned to drive a couple hours east - through the darkness - to a fantastic petroglyph site that I could enjoy when the sun crested the horizon the following morning. But, as is often the case, I was easily distracted as I set up the navigation system and noticed that my route would take me right by Cathedral Gorge State Park. We'd briefly stopped at Cathedral Gorge for breakfast on a previous trip south to explore the eastern Mojave, but we hadn't spent much time there and I knew that what we'd seen at Miller's Point…
4 Comments
Having gone to bed at a little over 6,000 feet above sea level and surrounded by snow, I was a little worried that I'd be freezing cold and that the tent would be covered in frost when I woke up in the morning. To my delight, neither came to pass, and as I climbed around on the rocks behind camp - looking for rock art - just before sunrise, I found myself hopeful for the day ahead. Good morning, sun! After watching the sun crest the horizon, I hopped from stone to stone on my way back to camp. Cereal…
11 Comments
It was with the best of intentions that I planned a trip to explore the Pahranagat Trail in southeast Nevada. The very first trip where I'd be flying - rather than driving - to make the trek south, I'd work my way north from Las Vegas to explore three wilderness' that were once home to Native American Indians: Arrow Canyon Wilderness, South Pahroc Wilderness, and Big Rocks Wilderness. It was a classic example of counting chickens before they hatch, but we'll get to that part of the story in good time. At the beginning, things were going quite well. Leaving…
2 Comments
More and more I've found that I enjoy hiking - more than driving - in Death Valley. Getting out into a canyon, walking across the desert, hiking up a sand dune - these are the times when I really find joy in the beauty of this grand place. And so, for the fifth time in two months, I'm headed back. The plan this time is to hike for three days, to three very special places. These are places that not many people visit, and that I'll do my best to keep a little more obscured than normal. Oh, and of…
12 Comments
Having not gotten much sleep the night before, I thought I'd conk out and sleep through the night here on my ridge in the Pine Grove Hills. No such luck, however - instead I wandered in and out of sleep, a little worried that the wind and rain would pick up during the night. Neither of those things happened, and a few minutes before my alarm went off, I decided I'd read a bit as I waited for color to spill across the sky. With views to both the east and west, I knew that this could be a primo…
10 Comments
It was a little before 2:00pm when I rejoined the main road through Mason Valley and headed north. I wasn't sure how far I'd get, but the views were great and though I wished for a little more blue sky, I really had no complaints as I crested a hill near the southern end of the valley, a grove of cottonwoods following the creek, below. Into the mountains. Always fun to zoom in and compress the background a little bit in situations like this. Apparently, I took a lot of photos here. A few minutes later I was driving into…
3 Comments
For the last eight months or so, I've been trying to get us down to the area along the Nevada-California border to explore the area west of Walker Lake (Nevada) and northeast of Mono Lake (California). One of the highlights - I hoped - would be summiting Mt. Patterson. For some reason, it seems that each time I made a plan, something would come up - another trip, bad weather, all the National Forests in California closing - that kind of thing. And, as it got later in the year, I'd pretty much written off the trip - after-all, by…
7 Comments