Deserts & Windstorms (& Snow! Oh my!)

I suppose we should have expected this:


..but it was very strange to go from sunny California weather to HUGE PILES OF SNOW in a matter of a couple of hours. After we left Sacramento, we were still of course heading inland, and had to get through the mountains at some point. We breached the mountain passes near Lake Tahoe and came out on the other side near Reno, Nevada. It only took a few hours to get through the scary looking region, and thank goodness it was a beautiful, clear day with nice clean, dry roads. We heard it snowed later that evening.

On the other side of the mountains was Reno, Nevada! Reno is quite a picturesque town - or the part that we saw as we blew on through was. We figured we didn't need to stop since we're going to be spending time in Las Vegas, and we wanted to get as far from the cold climate as possible. (Reno is actually at a high elevation, and is surrounded by snowy mountains.)

Nevada roads are amazing, by they way. Take THAT, California - you're our least favourite state so far! Anyway the landscape in Nevada is always incredible, and very alien to us. They have tumbleweeds here! We saw our first tumbling tumbleweed bouncing along the side of the road as we were driving. It was huge. We got all excited and watched it go! It bounced, as though in slow motion, along the shoulder of the highway and looked VERY cool. Then it bounced, as though in slow motion, right onto the road towards us, and we got a little freaked out. We couldn't stop as we had a huge semi truck right behind us, and I'm sad to report that we KILLED the very first tumbling tumbleweed that we'd ever seen. They're pretty feeble, so nothing happened to the truck, but still...

As we were driving along we passed Walker Lake, a pretty, turquoise-blue body of water in the middle of the desert, with mountains in the background. We hiked around near the lake for the afternoon. It struck me as odd that this body of water, in the middle of desert country, didn't support any plant-life around it's perimeter.


So the weather wasn't really the greatest for our first day in Nevada. As I already mentioned, we were still at a high elevation and it was cold! Also, it was quite overcast for most of the day. We pulled in to a rest area for the night that happened to be in a high wind zone. And the night we pulled in, there happened to be a wind storm. We lay in our bed inside our tiny Boler that night, listening to the wind scream across the desert. The poor Boler shook and shuddered. We had put all our stabilizing feet down, but it still felt as though a strong blast might knock us right over. It took us a long time to fall asleep!


Fortunately, the next day dawned clear and calm. We started out for Death Valley, oohing and aahing at the spectacular vistas of northern Nevada. Here's a picture of us at some pokey trees that I'm not confident enough to call cacti. Although they poked Mark pretty good.


We reached Beatty, Nevada and as I write we're sitting at the "Space Station RV Park" near Death Valley. We're going to go to Death Valley tomorrow - should be fun!