For Christmas this past year my friend Stephanie (Laura's partner) bought me a book of Utah off-road and 4-wheel trails. We hadn't used it until now, and since it was a beautiful day and we were free, we decided to pull the book out and see what we could find to explore. Jesse has never seen the Great Basin desert (from Western Utah to California), so we packed up the pugs, loaded the Xterra, and headed out I-80 west to the Utah/Nevada border (and a little wide-place-in-the-road casino town called Wendover, which the locals call Bendover). The Silver Island Mountains are extremely stark, and (as you will see) almost nothing grows there. Still, for all that they have a peculiar, almost savage beauty, which is particularly surreal for a southerner like me. This is true desert country, and there are no springs, rivers, or lakes to be found, so hiking out here definitely requires careful pre-planning. However, this area is also crisscrossed with 4-wheel drive trails, and we went about 28 miles deep into the desert on one. The whole road is a loop that is over 65 miles long, but we got tired (we kept stopping and hiking/climbing peaks, canyons, and valleys) so we turned around right about the halfway point.
Our trip also included a stop at the Bonneville Salt Flats -- very weird place. Imagine a place so flat you seem to see the curvature of the planet, so barren not even the simplest life forms can exist. Now imagine salt deposits that are over six feet deep and densely packed, that look like snow from a distance but is hard and gritty up close. Weird.
Anyway, the whole trip was great -- the pugs loved it, we loved, and hopefully you'll enjoy the pix. Definitely a unique place to visit if you've never seen high desert.
Educational Moment: The Great Basin Desert, the largest U. S. desert, covers an arid expanse of about 190,000 square miles and is bordered by the Sierra Nevada Range on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Columbia Plateau to the north and the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to the south. This is a cool or "cold desert" due to its more northern latitude, as well as higher elevations (at least 3,000 feet, but more commonly from 4,000 to 6,500 feet). Precipitation, generally 7-12 inches annually, is more evenly distributed throughout the year than in the other three North American deserts. Winter precipitation often falls as snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment