Pictures from Day 5, 6 & 7.

Finally got all the pictures from the second leg of my ghost town hunting trip. Click here to see them.

Pictures from Day 1, 2 & 3

I got the photo gallery for the first leg of my trip alltoghether, if you want to check them out, click here. I'll get the second set as soon as possible. I was wasting a bunch of time messing around with re doing my website (http://www.srossi.net/), and decided it wasn't working too well. I was trying to mesh the new with the old, and it just wasn't looking very cohesive. "So, I'm gonna drop back 5 and punt. I've figured out how to keep everything on the old site intact, in the background, and start from scratch with the site. You won't see any changes until I have it already to launch.

2 hours later : just got done adding captions to the photo gallery. Hopefully that will make the pictures more interesting, knowing what they're all about.

The Trip : The overall view.

Click on the map to get a bigger view, and to activate links.

Saturday, June 14th : Day 7

Same as with day 6, >click here to read the blog and see the pictures.

Friday, June 13th : Day 6

Well, day 6 was so chocked full of stuff to look at that by the time I got to 11 pictures and hadn't even been through the Death Valley set, I decided there was no way I was going to fit them all on here. This gave me the freedom to go overboard, and ended up with 41 photos for today. To see the post and the pictures, we have to go off Blogger and onto my personal page. Just click here, and I'll take you there. And, just like here on Blogger, if you click on any picture, it will give you the full sized one. At the bottom of the post will be a link to bring you right back here. Sorry about the detour, have a great day.

Thursday, June 12th : Day 5

We left Salt Lake sometime around 10 or 11, and headed out to Wendover. Nothing too exciting there, it was the usual I-80 drive, except I did find out that they had fenced in the "Tree of Utah" so you couldn't get to ti to pee on it anymore. Another tradition bites the dust.
At Wendover, which is directly over the Nevada/Utah border, we got off the freeway and headed down SR93, a 2 lane highway typical of American travel before the advent of the divided freeway. Thanks to the freeway, these types of roads are free of idiots and quite enjoyable to drive. We headed down 93 to Ely then took 6 all the way to Tonopah. [I was reading it right off the map Alex, that's the only reason I got it right]. One thing we discovered on our drive across Nevada is that it consists of several rows of mountains, or hills, seperated by logn, long, long stretches of incredible flat lands. Hence, the roads are long, long, long stretches of perfectly straight road broken up by the occasional 2 mile curvy ride through the hills.
About 12 miles before Ely, we hit the town of McGill, NV. Not a very big town, and it looked like it was on it's way to becoming a ghost town, or maybe was recovering from being one. Either way, they had a bunch of cool stores for sale, with the old time look to them. Alex and I decided we could probably get one for a song, so our latest plan is to buy a store and set up shop. We haven't decided what we're going to sell, Alex thought of T-Shirts that say "I bought this store in McGill and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt". I pictured the episode of "Dharma & Greg" where she opens up a shop but doesn't sell anything. The store is full of people just sitting, chatting and drinking coffee, and when people come in and ask what she's selling and her response is "What do you need?" When they answer she'd just yell out to the crowd "Anyone got ...?" Guess you had to be there. But I just pictured us fixing up the place and then spending my summers sitting on the front stoop, watching people go by and chatting. {Keep in mind we were driving through Nevada at the time. You thought there was a whole lot of nothing in my picture of Southern Utah, Nevada's got 2 or 3 times as much nothing.}
Anyway, after that there was Ely, which seems to get an amazing amount of press for such a small town. After Ely we got onto route 6 and headed down toward route 95 which would bring us to Death Valley. We had planned on staying at a campground between Saulsbury and McKinney summits down by the town of Tonopah. On the way down we saw a few dust devils (see picture), a huge lava flow, and smoke from a big fire (see picture). Now, at first the smoke didn’t look too ominous, but after a few minutes took on a very mushroom cloud look to it. Which made me think that the last thing I want to see is a mushroom cloud when I’m driving through the Nevada desert. Well, it wasn’t nuclear (or is that nucular?), but it did seem oddly surrealistic to me.
Oh, and then there was the sand flats. Called “Lunar Crater” on the map, it was what seems to be the bottom of a dry lake bed. In class I told someone that I thought it was about 30 miles long and 10 miles wide, but I checked it out on Google Maps and found I was just a tad off. By like a factor of 10. It really is only about 3 ½ miles long and a mile and a half wide, but driving on it it seemed to go on forever. We got the car going up to about 100 MPH, and did some really cool sideways slides, at a much lower speed of course. We got a ton of good pictures, that I put into a sort of video. As Alex brought the car back from the first round of dust running, I was taking the pictures, the first thing we said was “Danny’s gonna love this” (that’s our little brother, the 3 of us have been hanging around together for, well, most of our lives). So, we’re hoping to get together a long weekend with all of us out there for some playing. No speed limit, nobody to bug us, and as long as we don’t blow anything up or harass the cattle we’ll be left alone. After we decided we were wasting too much gas (forgot to fill up in Ely) we headed out to the camp ground. Which was totally underwhelming (see picture). Nothing but gravel and a couple little trees, right off the highway. Uh, thanks, but no. We headed down to Tonopah, got a hotel room, had some dinner, checked out the town and bunkered down for the night.

Oh, and Alex, feel free to comment on anything I miss. I want to get everything on here, and I'm bound to forget something.....

Tuesday, June 10th : Day 3

Well, I culled the 3,645 pictures I took down to a mere 11. I have no idea what my memory limit is on blogger, but I don't want this to be the photo gallery. Here, they're supposed to enhance the story, not be it. So, you'll have to wait until I cull through the 356,950 pictures from the two trips and get the photo galleries up.

Anyway, today was the ghost town day. Sego and Thompson, and as it turns out Thompson Springs too. The day started out much as usual, with the hotel's continental breakfast. Writer had to have twice the English Muffin as she meant to, because one, in a fit of suicidal despair, jumped out of the bag and fell to it's death on the floor. Right in front of her (musta been traumatic). Most Jr. High teacher's firmly believe in the 5 second rule, so rather than throw the muffin away, she killed any germs on it by toasting it and ate it.

Despite the post-trauma stress of the muffin incident, we headed up towards I-70 and Sego, Thompson and Thompson Springs. Sego and Thompson are true ghost towns, nobody lives there and nobody has for several decades. Thompson Springs is right off the freeway, and is not a full fledged ghost town, we didn't even realize it was a ghost town until on our way back

First we went to Thompson, which is up about 4 miles of dirt road. We had several petroglyph sitings on the way up, some of them were really cool, some had been defaced. Some were defaced by autograph carvings and pictures dating from the 1910's and 20's, which sparked a conversation about the difference between ancient writings and graffiti. After all, petroglyphs really are just ancient graffiti, and looking at the "Joe was here" from the 1920's was cool, but the same thing from the 70's was annoying. Not that I am in any way condoning the destruction of petroglyphs, but the truth is that if I had written "Max wuz hear, 2008" alongside the others (and no, I did not), a couple hundred years from now someone would look at it and think "Wow, 2008. Who was Max and what the hell was he trying to say?" We also saw a really cool old trestle on the way there, most likely used to carry the ore down the canyon.

Thompson itself was set in quite an idyllic setting. At a bend in the canyon, up against the hill shaded by huge colttonwood (I think) trees that were right along the bank of a obviously not always dry river, it was beautiful and calm. There were three houses in different levels of decay, but the coolest thing was the oven that looked like it was still in functioning condition. (see picture at top).

Next stop was Sego. We passed their little cemetery on the way there, a lot of the graves were unmarked, and on one it was obvious some $%^9*% stole the headstone. But it was pretty interesting nonetheless. Sego is on a small incline hillside in the center of the canyon. We found three structures that were still standing, ahem, well, sort of. The house, a wood construction building, fared the worst of the three, the other two are what I would consider salvageable, this one not so much. Most of the plaster was gone, you could see the lathe on the remaining walls. The front outside wall was all but gone. (In the picture you are looking at the back of the house, the best preserved part). Neither Writer or I dared go inside the building, don't know if the floor would have held us or if our movement on it would have brought more walls down. From what was left, though, it must have been a nice house. Two floors, many rooms. On Writer's blog she has a picture of Sego from the 1920's, you can see what the house looked like when it was in use. There was also two stone buildings, or shells of buildings left, that I think was a store and some sort of office. The insides are completely gone, floors and all, but the outside walls look strong enough that if Sego ever came alive again, you could build inside them and have original looking buildings.

After Sego we headed back towards Moab, and decided to stop in Thompson Springs to look at, well, ok, I saw a 1970 Ford XL Fastback sitting out in a field rusting and just had to check it out. You'll see the picture later, because even more interesting was the old Cadillac camper we found in the same field. Yeah, looks like someone took an old 4 door Cadillac and cut the roof to custom fit the camper to it. Must have been a sight to see cruising down the highway. We ended up spending an hour or so in Thompson Springs, because despite it being an inhabited (sort of) town, it had several abandoned buildings. One of them was a Cafe, looked like the left in the middle of a shift, there was still syrup sitting on the counter. The other buildings I'm not sure about, one looked like a residence, maybe for the Cafe owners. That too looked like it had been left in the middle of the night. A small office of some sort, a stable. Not exactly sure, but they were all clustered around what looked like it used to be the center of town. Right across the street from the abandoned Motel. Creepy, horror movie motel. There was only one room that still had a front door that closed, the rest were wide open, despite signs of recent (6 months maybe) inhabitance. That wasn't the creepy part. I felt like I walked into the middle of a teen slasher movie at the 3rd room, where someone had put paint on their hands and left smeared hand prints on the wall, along with the writing "This is my home, forever" and "Go home". But that wasn't the eeriest of it, that came back at the office. Hand prints all over the place. A typewriter with a beer bottle next to it, on a desk in the middle of the room. Writings on the wall about death and hauntings. A half empty (or is it half full?) can of peanut butter and almost empty jar of strawberry preserves on top of the refrigerator. The one thing that actually made me laugh was the word "Yum" painted on the fridge door. Other than that, creepy, creepy, creepy. After the motel we pretty much left the wonderful town of Thompson Springs. Once out of town we started talking and realized that even though we heard sounds of inhabitants (vehicles running, dogs tied up outside houses, water, etc..) we didn't see a single person the whole time we were there - which was at least an hour. Maybe it was because of the motel, or maybe it just added to it, but now we were really creeped out. Not nightmares for the rest of the week creeped out, but just "that was really freakin' weird" creeped out.

Next stop was a return to Canyonlands Visitor Center, for two reasons. We had to get some pictures of the Shafer Trail from up on the ridge and we had to tell Ranger Nate that we made it down the trail with the Subaru. Ranger Nate was really busy with some lady, trying to get her credit or gift card or whatever to work, so we just left a message for him with the other ranger. She seemed pretty impressed that we took a Subaru down the Shafer Trail and assured us that she would let Ranger Nate know we survived.

Thus endeth the Moab trip. We went back to the hotel, packed up and headed home, mostly on accounta there was a storm coming in the next day since we had the time left I'd rather drive home in the evening than get up early and drive home the next day. Fortunately Writer, who would have preferred it the other way around, agreed to my plan.