Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

The Loneliest Road

2 April - Eureka, NV

I'm currently pretty suntanned. Well, it's that kind of pink suntan that pallid Brits get, but the sun's certainly got to me over the last few days. This hasn't been made much better by all the driving around with the top down on the car, but there are some experiences for which that's pretty essential. One of these experiences was today's drive, which originally was going to be only as far as Reno (around 215 miles from Berkeley) but which I rather impulsively extended by about the same distance again in order to get as far as Eureka, Nevada. Why did I do this? Well, highway 50 through Nevada is known as "The Loneliest Road", and I had to find out for myself whether that claim was true. Over 400 miles in a day is a lot (and to tell the truth, I'm shattered after 8.5 hours of more or less non-stop driving), but if you look at a map of the USA I've only travelled a tiny distance across the country as a whole. This place is big.

(And this entry's long, so hit the link to read the whole thing..)

Leaving Berkeley on the I-80 towards Sacramento I was wondering if this drive was all a big mistake. This stretch of the I-80 has to be a strong contender for the Worst Road I've Ever Encountered, and that includes roads like the M25 and the M4. Too many lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic weaving in and out at a speed slightly over the speed limit, constant streams of traffic joining and leaving, the whole nightmare cocktail that takes any pleasure that there may be in driving and converts it into irritation and stress. This goes on more or less until the road reaches Sacramento, at which it becomes much worse and then gets better as the local traffic thins out and the road points itself purposefully towards the Nevada border.

However, before the border there's the woody and mountainous Sierra Nevada, and the road climbs constantly through forest, past markers counting off the elevation in thousands of feet (Americans love elevations. Just about every city limits sign also carries the town's elevation.) until finally, all of a sudden, the road breaks the treeline and a breathtaking view of snow-clad mountains appears ahead. A long train of Union Pacific box cars was fighting its way up the steep railway gradient next to the Interstate. The roof was down and the altitude meant I was freezing cold, but turning the heater on full blast helped prevent my limbs freezing solid and right then, the view was so amazing that I didn't really care anyway. It can be hard keeping to the correct lane on I-80 at this point because the lines on the road have been worn away by the winter snows and the snow chains which are needed for vehicles to get through when the roads are covered in snow - the surface is cracked and scarred from all this abuse.

The road tops out at Donner Summit (7229ft ASL) and from then it's a long, slow, curvy descent down through the Sierras and, eventually, to the state line. Crossing a state line turned out to be something of an anticlimax - just a sign saying "Welcome to Nevada" and a bump as the road surface changed from California road to Nevada road. I had noticed an inspection station spanning the westbound road a few miles earlier, flying the Californian flag, so maybe things are a little more rigorous going into the Golden State than they are going into the Silver State.

Being in Nevada, Reno seems to consist mostly of casinos. There was a little heavy traffic as it was Friday afternoon, but once past Reno and the splendidly-named Sparks things loosened up again and I stopped at a small town called Mustang (appropriately, as the Absurd Hire Car I'm driving is a Ford Mustang) to finish thawing out my frozen limbs and, well, put the roof back up as it was a bit too chilly. The turning I was looking for was a bit further down the road - the US50 (ALT) which would take me through Fernley to US50 proper and the beginning of the Loneliest Road. Fernley turned out to be extremely congested, probably as by then it was 4:30PM and everyone was leaving work for the weekend, but having eventually meandered through town I found myself on the right road. After Fallon, the last town of any size for hundreds of miles, the traffic dropped off and the road began to live up to its name.

There's a common British stereotype of the American rural highway - a two-lane strip of tarmac with a dotted yellow line down the middle, stretching off ruler-straight into the distance with nothing else in sight. That's just about what some stretches of 50 are like, although as it climbs and descends quite a bit it has its share of windy hairpin mountain bends as well, particularly around Austin. There's no sign of human habitation for miles and miles, but lots of different scenery to look at - salt flats near the beginning, some arid scrub used for cattle ranching, hills and mountains, and even occasionally another vehicle. Especially when it's dark, cars coming the other way are often visible for a couple of minutes or more before they pass by. Their headlights appear, appear to hover in the air for some time, and then suddenly get bigger and bigger before whooshing past in the darkness leaving nothing in front of you but tarmac and road edge markers flitting past. The altitude means the air is cold and crisp, and also means the landscape looks even more windswept and remote than it would otherwise. There really is nothing out there, and if you break down you're reliant on someone stopping and helping you out unless you're near one of the very few gas stations or the (one) phone along the stretch from Fallon to Austin. The phone is marked as "The Loneliest Phone", and from the road I could see it was covered in notes and other bits and pieces. It also appeared to have a couple of bullet holes, which doesn't seem to be at all unusual for this part of the world - road signs seem to be particularly popular things to use for target practice from a moving pickup.

Being a bit dim I hadn't bothered to fill up the car in Fallon before the really isolated bits of the road began, so although I had half a tank of petrol I also had about 180 miles to go before reaching my destination for the night. With the road being as isolated as it is, running out of petrol was not at all an attractive option, so I decided it would be wise to fill up when I got a chance. The chance eventually arose and I pulled in at a place which, while marked with a place name on most of the maps, consisted of one building with a small motel area, a bar and one petrol pump. The bar, of course, had lots of men in cowboy hats sitting at it. This, I thought, was about as far as it's possible to be from Berkeley, at least politically speaking. The folk were friendly and I was invited to stay for a drink (once it had been ascertained that my accent wasn't French), but as it was getting later and I wanted to get to Eureka in time to get something to eat, I had to press on.

The road wound on, and on, and on for a long time, through Austin (about 100 miles out from Fallon), and on towards my final destination, Eureka, where I finally arrived at 8:25 - eight and a half hours after leaving Berkeley. Eureka is a pleasant small town (Highway 50 is the main street) which was founded when some incredibly rich deposits of silver were found in the area and half the universe headed there to stake claims. It has a few hotels and motels along with a couple of bars and cafés, one of which (the Eureka Café) was kind enough to remain open a little while past their closing time of 9PM so that I could get a steak sandwich (okay, a large slab of steak with fries and a couple of slices of toast on the side).

I now have to decide whether to now head north and up to Oregon before swinging down back into California from the north, or south and down to Las Vegas and Death Valley before taking Highway 1 (the Pacific Coast Highway) north from LA to San Francisco. Whatever I do, I have to be back in the Bay Area by next Friday so there's plenty of time to take things at a fairly leisurely pace from now on. I might even stay a second night in Eureka to have a bit of a rest after today's massively long drive. I'm finding I like Nevada - the people are friendly and the scenery's, well, big.

Posted by mpk at April 3, 2004 9:48 AM | TrackBack