Crossing Nevada

There is really only one way across Nevada.  In 1828, British trapper Peter Skene Ogden bumped into the east-west thoroughfare while heading south, and explored it in both directions.  In 1833, the Walker Expedition used the thoroughfare to cross Nevada travelling west, and in 1834 followed it again as they returned east.  In 1827, fur trapper Jedediah Smith tried to cross Nevada without using this thoroughfare.  Only Smith and one other member of his expedition made it back to the Rockies.

Indians used the Humboldt River as a path across Nevada long before trappers ever arrived, and settlers would follow the river after the trappers left.  The path along the Humboldt became known as the "California Trail" when wagon-hauling settlers and gold rushers used it in the decades after the Walker Expedition, and decades after the early settlers, the transcontinental railroad was laid along the river’s banks.  Now, in addition to the rails, Interstate 80 follows the venerable Humboldt across Nevada.

It’s easy to see why the Humboldt has remained a popular travel route.  Everything else is dry.  Mountain ranges draw themselves up from the flats below, but they offer no coursing streams or evergreen forests.  Instead their slopes are brown, stubbled with scrub brush at the bottoms and barren at the tops.  The flats below appear to have inspired the color choices of military camouflage designers – dull green brush, light brown weeds, medium brown dust, dark brown rocks.  All the plants are drought-resistant.  Gullies and washes cross the flats like the crevices of your palm, but they hold no water.  Instead, their bottoms are bare of vegetation but dustier than the flats around them, as if to mock thirsty travelers.  Tracks a traveler left in a gully would remain visible for weeks.

A basin in the basin and range.

Crossing a gully.

But over this colorless expanse, stretching from mountaintop to mountaintop, spans a brilliant blue sky.  Unobscured by trees, the sky wraps itself around a traveler like an outside-in robin’s egg.  The few clouds that hurdle the Sierra Mountains to the west and arrive over the basin and range play across the sky like colts, linking together then spreading apart in endless variations.  The sky’s lovely exuberance contrasts with the earth’s drab taciturnity, and the sun lights up the heavens with a fierce beauty that, I imagine, grew tiresome to a horse-mounted traveler.  What a horse-mounted traveler needed was not celestial grandeur, but water.

Hence the Humboldt.  I exited I-80 at a place where it diverged from the Humboldt, and I followed a dirt track that, along with the railroad, stayed with the river.  The flats stayed the same: sagebrush, scattered tufts of sere grass, dust.  But the river valley widened below me, and deepened.  It held yellows and greens.  Riparian grasses and willows grew tall, and two sets of railroad tracks wound through it.  And then the river valley disappeared from view – all I could see were basalt bluffs where the river had been a few moments ago.

Humboldt River.

I stopped the truck to investigate.  Duke and I crossed through the sagebrush and crossed a barbed-wire fence, heading toward the river.  It was a warm day, and I was wearing a tee shirt.  I scuttled into a deep rocky ravine, stepping over mottled brown and black rocks that clattered as they tumbled down the ravine ahead of me.  This was no longer the lightly compacted dust of the playa, gradually turning to sandstone – this was basalt, the igneous rock that spews from midoceanic ridges and lines the ocean bottoms.  This was hard stuff.  I got to the bottom of the ravine and glanced back for Duke, who stood at the top looking at me with his ears perked.  Duke’s instincts for self-preservation are strong, and he won’t take risky steps unless he’s sure it’s necessary.

“Come on,” I said.  “Stop wussing around.”  Duke picked his way down the slope, making less clatter than I had.  We scrambled up the other side, both of us using all fours.  I was hot by the time I reached the top, where Duke was already standing.

Across a few more sagebrushes, and there we were: the edge of a canyon, carved by the Humboldt through basalt.  Palisades Canyon, I would later learn that it was called.  Sheer cliffs, and at the bottom the river flowed peacefully, as if sawing through the basalt had taken no great effort.  The water rippled over light shoals, eddied in long pools edged by sandbars.  It was beautiful.  I reflected ruefully that I had forgotten my water bottle.  In Nevada, you can’t go far without water.

Sunset in the basin and range.