Dad & I let Mom sleep in Saturday morning while we checked out the petroglyphs site.
Pretty much immediately, we got distracted by cool rocks to climb (just regular rocks, not ancient art ones) and found fellow creatures enjoying the sunshine.
A far larger & more terrifying creature emerged from a cave but it retreated when we threw rocks at it.
Lots of pretty wildflowers and stunning lichen growths.
There was a trail to the top of a ridge, where we called Mom to come out and take a picture of us. It was way higher than it looks. (This seems to be the common theme of this blog - events in photo are more impressive than they appear, trust me!)
The petroglyphs at this site aren’t much to see; most are too eroded to make out, but not this 5-legged Velociraptor!
We got back on US-50 towards Reno after breakfast. We had a Boondocker host waiting for us, so we weren’t able to dawdle much, but we saved time for the important stops, like this famous shoe tree:
The original tree stood covered with shoes for decades, but was chopped down by jerks in 2010. There was funeral held which brought the grieving formerly-shod from hours away. Since then several other neighboring trees have carried the torch.
I had a pair of sneakers that were on their last lace, which I’d planned to trash before my flight home to save baggage space. After a few dozen warm-up throws I made it on the first try!
I dated the shoe soles to make things easier for future archeologists.
A short jaunt further down 50, we drove into Sand Springs, a giant natural sand dune where, unlike White Sands & Great Sand Dunes, motorized vehicles are not only allowed but possibly required.
This being Memorial Day weekend, it was crawling with ATV-ers and their giant rigs who had reserved space in advance, but the park rangers were kind enough to let us park and wander around a bit and look very much not-from-around-here.
Of course we found the ice cream truck!
We finally made it to Fernley, NV, on the eastern outskirts of Reno. We chatted with our Boondockers host in his amazing backyard wood-working shop and then headed back out to get tacos for dinner, where we ran into the local Kooky Car Guy (every town’s got at least one.)
On the way back to the camper, we passed this cool lotus pagoda with mesh leaves made from bottle caps, which is also a tree house.
We got to bed early to rest up for an early tee-time at mini golf!
No comments:
Post a Comment