Lenten Roadtrip Finale: Western Wilderness
In The Desert, America’s Soul Is Always Laid Bare
It didn’t take us 40 days to make our way across the entire widths of Utah and Nevada, some 730 miles total. It took only two days, at an average of 70 miles per hour. But the wildly varying, brutally beautiful landscapes that unfolded around us in shades from white to slate brown to deep brick-red as we made our way home, will stay with us forever.
And the enormity of it all made me ponder, as deserts often do, how minuscule humanity is in the grand scope of nature – how the whole “speck in the universe” cliché is not only true, but at once freeing and terrifying.
Take Colorado National Monument, for example. In fewer than 15 minutes from downtown Grand Junction, you’re transported, via snaking Rim Rock Road, from multimillion-dollar home sites to box canyons cut through multi-hued, several-hundred-feet-deep vertical cliffs; from the province of modern ranchers and miners and farmers to the ancient and sacred gathering grounds of Ute and Shoshone. Time both expands and condenses in this astonishing place, sending the mind back over the eons as winds and water and the massive movement of faulted earth did their slow-motion work, even as it struggles to take in and process and appreciate the drama and natural majesty right there, within the reach of one’s touch and echoing voice. A friend and Colorado resident told us we just had to set aside a couple hours here before hitting the road into Utah, where the color and shapes seen right here, in a relatively small area, are writ large over millions of acres of national park land. Wise man, and lucky us, though we did come away feeling … not quite insignificant, but “perspectivized,” perhaps.
We wouldn’t have to wait long to feel insignificant, however. A few miles of I-70 into Utah on our way to a final overnight in the roaring metropolis of Ely, Nevada, the terrain transitioned into full-on high desert mode. To the right, the westernmost remnants of the Grand Plateau with fingers of Rockies beyond; to the left, the clearly discernible Colorado River canyon jutting off at an angle toward a massive group of peaks – Haystack Mountain, Mt. Waas, Horse Mountain – with yet more red rock formations just west of the range: Arches National Park. And straight ahead, a broad, bleached gently sloping tableau of denuded caliche and rock, with more ranges beyond, blue in the great distance. Pretty much from the Colorado border to the town of Green River, there’s nothing manmade except the road itself and the vehicles upon it. (OK, there’s an Exxon station at Thompson Springs, but blink and you’ll miss the turnoff.) Joni Mitchell was right: We are stardust, one with the very grains of sand that blow by us on the dry, relentless breeze.
We gassed up in Green River, the service-less stretch is longer yet, though more impossibly beautiful with each mile ticked off. Just beyond the San Rafael River – like the Green, a Colorado tributary – is its namesake Reef, part of a larger area called the San Rafael Swell, the element-battered remnants of a multimillion-year-old dome where shards of grayish sandstone jut from the crumpled crust at about a 60-degree angle, in unison, like some geological chorus line frozen in time. It’s a hint of the natural wonders of Capitol Reef National Park 50 miles or so to the southwest, and leads into a winding, uphill jaunt onto a plateau rife with yet more rock sculpture with cool names like “The Thumb,” “The Squeeze,” “Black Dragon” and “Tip Top Arch.” There are petroglyphs, sandy washes, verdant river ribbons, and countless counters to the stubborn sentiment, among some folks, that America’s western deserts are essentially devoid of life. That’s dead wrong. Life is rife here; it’s just seen and heard in more acute and remote doses. It’s also incredibly delicate in its toughness, if that makes sense. There’s next to no margin for error for a desert species of flora or fauna to survive, much less thrive, which makes a light human footprint, and the government protections to keep it that way, so vital. We belong to these wild places, and they belong to us, but only to a respectful – reverential – point. No oil wells or strip mines should ever sully them.
We kept rolling west, through two or three riparian zones within the space of a few miles – the magic of rapid elevation change. The southern portion of the Wasatch Range came into view, and we eventually made our way through its southern tip, admiring the snow-shrouded peaks above groves of juniper before dropping into the Salina Valley, where we transitioned to Highway 50, our first two-lane road of the entire trip. It would carry us most of the way home.
After make our way through a dry lake dust storm in dead-flat western Utah (two of the longest hours of our lives), we came to the first of many mountain ranges. The second range, anchored by Wheeler Peak, the second-highest mountain in the state of Nevada, contains the entirety of Great Basin National Park – one of the Lower 48’s newest, and least attended. We detoured to its visitors center, which remains Covid-closed, and spent a bit hiking the park’s lower reaches, finding the (also locked) entrances to Lehman Caves, and pledging that we’d return. It’s the only national park in our home state, for God’s sake. We’ve gotta make it happen.
Finally, the homestretch.
The 350 miles from the Utah state line to Fernley, Nevada, has long been dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America.” It’s no lie. When we left Ely and headed west, over or around at least 10 of the state’s 314 named mountain ranges, we started counting cars going both directions. More than 20 were heading the opposite direction, but by the time we got to Fallon – the largest town between the border and Reno, with 8,500 souls – we passed only six vehicles on our side of the broken white line.
But is it a boring trek? Not at all. In fact, in terms of visual drama – as I said way back in my first Lenten Roadtrip entry – I’d stack Northern Nevada’s basin-and-range rollercoaster, with its 50-mile views across valleys of virgin sage, framed by hulking peaks reaching more than 11,000 feet skyward, up against any natural eye candy America has to offer. It’s the kind of wilderness that never fails to stir the imagination, fill the heart with wandering wonder, and open a space for a brand of gratitude that we share with every generation of human beings who have passed this way, and that way, and countless other ways across the continent.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return. But in the meantime, we keep moving, marveling, and learning. We get lost by design, then find our way back home with the same name, but changed within. We mine the divine within ourselves, and discover that like the universe, it’s limitless.
This one made me cry - happy kind
Gald you made the trek safely. “Bern through the desert on a horse 🐴 with no name”🎶