Day 67 (July 20). ID, OR, and NV

From: Boise, ID

To: Battle Mountain, NV

Miles today: 316

Total miles: 13972

I got on the road pretty early, considering the activities of the previous evening; about 9 am.  Rather than driving east on I-84 as I originally planned, I decided to take a slight detour west.  I-84 and ID 55 took me across about 20 miles of Boise suburbs, and there I caught up to US 95, which I had ridden through northern Idaho from the Canadian border.  (It turns out US 95 goes all the way to Yuma, Arizona, mostly in Idaho and Nevada.  Sounds like a good road trip for someone.)  Boise is in the Snake River Valley, which is very wide and runs east-west (the Oregon Trail ran through here); but I was now heading south. The picture below is not the best, but you can see where the (admittedly irrigated) farmland ends and the high, dry country begins.

The end of the Snake River Valley, where Boise is.  Looking south, toward the "Northern Basin and Range."

Boise itself is actually pretty high in elevation, at about 2700 feet.  Nonetheless, the climb-out from the valley was quite noticeable, and I spent the rest of the day at 4000-5000 feet.  US 95 runs mostly south, but cuts sufficiently west to pass through the southeastern corner of Oregon. Unlike coastal Oregon, this is high-altitude near-desert. 

Eastern Oregon, but representative of much of my travels today. That dark exposed rock is flood basalt, a type of lava.  It cools quickly on the surface and cracks into pieces, making it easy to move around during big (water) floods.  

Aside.  Same location as previous shot.  I checked it out, and that yellow bridge in the center is there to suspend a fiber optic cable over this currently dry creek bed.  Nevada has fiber optics running all over it, despite having very few people outside of the major cities.  To which I say, "God Bless America!"

US 95 continues into Nevada, and intersects Interstate I-80 at a town called Winnemucca.  The welcome sign, which I could kick myself for not getting a picture of, read “And Proud Of It!”  I tried to find evidence of this on Wikipedia, but it instead identifies the motto as “Winnemucca – Where the Streets are Paved.”  Either way, you have to appreciate a town with a sense of humor. I tried to visit their museum, but it is closed on Mondays. I turned east on I-80 and rode about 50 miles to Battle Mountain, Nevada, where I am now.

It was hard to tell how hot it really was.  It could have been 90, or 110.  It didn’t feel that hot because “it was a dry heat.”  Nonetheless, though I felt dry, every time I shifted position while riding some part of me that had been pressed against material came free and I felt the dampness of sweat, which quickly evaporated.  This is a recipe for dehydration, and I knew it and drank a bottle of water (which I refilled at rest stops) every 30-45 minutes. Even so, I felt like I was in one of those Star Trek environments in which all the fluids were being sucked out of my body through my pores.  Which I guess they were. 

Like every town in Nevada, this one has a casino; actually two; not bad for a town of 4000 people.  I asked someone working at the pizza joint where I got dinner if the townspeople regularly went there. She laughed and said there was no way to afford that; she went maybe once a year.  But since the town is on the interstate, and since there are so few towns in Nevada anyway, a combination of tourists and transient workers of various types keep the places going.  There are a lot of these workers; I got the last room in the hotel I’m staying in while the rest is filled with a variety of people there doing construction, working on “the power plant,” or in some way associated with the small amount of mining in this region. Also, I note that I-80 runs along the same route as an active railroad line, with a train roughly every hour.  Right outside my window. 

A few words about this scenery I rode through today.  The striking geological feature of the “Northern Basin and Range” eco-region, from my view, is how vast, and how flat, the regions between the mountain ranges are.  It is as if someone filled in a conventional mountain range to, say, the 75% level with sand (or lava, or volcanic ash), leaving just the highest peak sticking out.  In fact, this entire region is flood basalt (a type of lava that I have learned to recognize), with occasional large outcroppings of white volcanic ash, so perhaps this is what happened.  I’ll have to look into this later.

What I rode through today. (This is eastern Oregon.)   It is hard to get a sense of scale; in the picture on the right, the mountain in the background is probably ten miles away. 

View from the edge of town, where I'm staying -- Battle Mountain, Nevada