Northern Exposure II
^{Towards Alaska, 2005}

THIS IS IT! Thursday 4 August 2005.
_{From home, almost to Winnemucca NV}

Mid-Morning: TAKE-OFF! The RV seems less jammed than usual. I guess we're not taking enough stuff, heh heh. The fridge doesn't work and a strange padlock is on an outside door but we're going anyway. And I'm taping commentary the whole way!

We're away from the house at 11:11 or thereabouts in the morning for our great northern trip, Northern Exposure II. Finally. No cats or dogs on this trip, no animal puke to wipe up, no claw scars or sudden scurrying.

It's a typically beautiful Sierra Nevada summer day: the trees too thick and green and the sky too thin and clear for any meaningful photography. On this drive over Carson and Luther Passes we thread the usual litany of locales. Not that I noticed; I slept through most of it. Well, whaddya know? After running the RV down the road a little bit, the refrigerator seems to be working somewhat.

LAKE TAHOE ETC: So, we're up at Tahoe now. We came up here for some free money. That happens every now and then, courtesy of a casino desperate for clientele. We stopped for a subway sandwich; the coughing cashier could have started new ecosystems just by breathing into a petri dish. Maureen suggests, new civilizations.

Carson City is as lovely as usual. That means it's a real slow slog through town. This city really needs a bypass operation. Its arteries are terribly clogged. Ah, highway surgeons are at work on the north side, slowly reconstructing the pericardium. Excellent. Will we live to see its completion?

EVENING, two sunrises until Hiroshima Day. A very hot time in Reno, getting resupplied, getting some automotive services, not all we need. For awhile the fridge worked and now it doesn't. So we'll be looking for fridge service in Mucktown (as Winnemucca is known to locals) tomorrow.

in Sparks, not far north of Reno-Tahoe airport, we saw an office supply store with a big sign out front. The signpost was done up as 25-foot-tall stack of filing cabinets. Heh.

Rolling east-northeast out of Reno on I-80, following the old Emigrant Trail. From, well, a few miles out of Reno there's some hot dry mountains; beyond that it's just hot and dry, some of the least appetizing landscape around. This was the journey of death for lots of the early overlanders. By now we're around the Humboldt Sink, and the overland trail from the east was pretty good up to here. But from the Sink to Reno, that's where the wagons and teams and emigrants broke down. Fortunately we can avoid that fate. Can't we?

SKA-A-RAMA: Once we got past the mountains beyond Reno, radio signals from the major city stations started dying away. It seemed like we were leaving civilization, going into a radioland of shitkickers and jeezus music. But here now we're getting a very strong Ska station, I think Spanish language Ska. Very entertaining, yah.

Ah, this Ska radio is a college station out of Reno, with a Reggae-Ska show. I knew it was too good to be true. Couldn't actually have a Spanish Ska station in Lovelock, eh? Naw... RastaRama in the Desert, says Maureen.

With the sun at a low angle and the shadows long, vegetation visible from the road looks green. Lots of sage, et cetera. We catch up with and pass a passenger train, and we're only doing 62 mph. Slow train from Reno. Amtrak Superliner, EAT MY DUST!!

Uh oh, here comes a cowboy waltz: SADDLE UP BOYS (click here). It's writ at Rye Patch, Nevada. And stop me before I compose again.

The sun sets on the other side of the Shawnee Mountains. On this side is the long thin Rye Patch Reservoir, the fattening of the Humboldt River; it picks up the sky glow like a jagged krait. So looking from the highway, there's dry yellow grass, and dark green vegetation around the resevoir; the blue of the water, and beyond, the deep indigo of the mountains, and the orange sunburst silhouette. Off to the east, a layer of clouds, the first we've seen in awhile. Is that the edge of a storm system or just heat clouds from the great desert beyond?

NIGHT: We're campering in Raspberry Canyon (west of Winnemucca, NV). Temperature was close to 110°f in Reno today. Won't be much better in Mucktown tomorrow. We hope to scoot up along the west side of Idaho in the next day, across the hot dry Snake River Valley, and get up into mountains the day after. Early August isn't the best time to be traversing the Great Basin desert — not the worst time either, at least it's not mid-September.

Friday 5 August 2005 - STILL ESCAPING!
_{Raspberry Canyon NV to White Bird Summit ID}

CATTLE: Arising at a moderate time on a hot morning, the cows and calves and bulls watch us depart our rough little campersite next to a corral in Raspberry Canyon. We descend the dirt road back to the interstate, heading for Mucktown and repairs. With a fridge fix and an oil change, we'll be ready for anything this side of Great Slave Lake and hopefully beyond.

This high desert landscape is sere and austere, punctuated with patches of irrigation, a dusty haze laying over everything. Way off in the distance to the south is line of clouds. The clouds are always way off on the horizon, never over us. never right here.

We pass a billboard announcing a nearby town, it bears a picture of the Statue of Liberty and says: BATTLE MOUNTAIN - Voted the ARMPIT OF AMERICA - We didn't know you were looking

WINNEMUCCA: The refrigerator seems to have started working again. Good thing, since nobody in Mucktown does RV refrigerator service. The nearest help is, what's that, 170 miles back in Reno. Plan B is, get a block of ice.

A bit north of Mucktown, we crest over Paradise Summit, 4900 feet in a dry sagebrush pass. This is about the same elevation as Antigua Guate­mala and Lake Atitlan, but a slightly different aspect, eh? Pale blue skies; a couple of heat cumulus off to the north. It's hard to pinpoint exactly the *heart* of the Great Basin, but this will do.

THE GREAT BASIN, also know geographically as the Basin and Range Province of North America, lies between the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Sierra Nevadas and Southern Cascades on the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, the Colorado Plateau to the south. No external drainage, just lots of generally north-south trending ranges and basins, the latter of which are mostly alkali flats plus a few salty lakes. This is beautiful country, except in midsummer — or midwinter, when it's enveloped in snow.

We cruise through these high sere lands, the rugged rocky bare Santa Rosa Mountains to our east; to west are low hills, and way off to the southwest is the Black Rock Desert, a burning land for the Burning Man festival. Crawling at 55 mph / 85 kph — we *are* anxious to get out of this hot dry country but we don't want to suck gas too fast while doing so.

As usual, the first couple days of the journey are rather, shall we say, capitol intensive, ie expensive. In two days we've already blown about a week of our 15-week budget. All to good purpose, we hope.

AT OREVADA, the limit of our previous excursions, is a small primeval rest area: a little wooden outhouse, two basic rusty metal shelters over rusty metal tables, flanking a stone monument. This is typical for these secondary highways; we're on a two-laner here. Last night, at the mouth of Raspberry Canyon, we stopped at an I-80 rest area with all the delightful ambience of a city prison. Lidless steel toilets, dead thick concrete walls, glaring fluorescent lights, and a scent of despair.

Uh oh, I've composed again. DESERT HAIKU FEVER! (click here)

And we pull out of the Great Basin into the Owyhee River valley — I guess this is Columbia Plateau — we'll soon be over on the Snake River Plain, not that it'll get any cooler anytime soon — but the countryside looks lusher — this is horse country here. How can I tell? All the horses, that's how.

We're stuck in long delays for apparently much-needed roadwork across this remote southeast corner of Oregon. Remote but much-trafficked; this seems to be the major route between the SF Bay Area and Reno and Boise.

As we climb the Columbia Plateau out of the Great Basin, the land seems physically similar but a bit more tempered, more used. We see more ranches, more habitations, more pullouts. And it helps that we have some more clouds, casting shadows, lending a softer light. Nothing looks its best under direct relentless solar glare.

POTATOES: Finally, skipping way around Boise, we're in potato country! Small farm plots with alternating strips of onions (still in the ground) and potatoes (the spuds all bagged up), all surrounding a beautiful gambrel roof barn topped with a cupola with a widow's walk, the latter presumably to spy the arrival of the potato schooners. Maureen suggests it's to view swarming locust and give alarm.

A local classical music station played a concerto by at 17th-century Hanoverian court composer named Josef Heineken. Somehow when I think of a Heineken concerto, I envisage the melody being played by blowing on beer bottles. Toot-toot-toot! And now on to a Renaissance piece by Peter Warlock. He just has a black-magical way with music.

NORTH of Payette and the Snake River Plain, US Hwy 95 follows the broad shallow valley of the Weiser River. Prosperous ranch and farm land. Higher blue mountains off at the horizons. This area could be the epitome of the Intermountain West. Habitations here wouldn't look out of place in south-central Utah (except that houses here are smaller because there aren't as many polygamists). Quite scenic but still low and hot. We crave elevation, and cool, and green, and closer clouds, and nearby wildlife... to rustle through our food.

North from the Snake, beyond the shortgrass-covered low rolling hills and beyond the Weiser Valley farmlands, we get to higher hills that have obviously been logged down to the nub — there's just nothing left. Finally, beyond that, beyond the wild-west village of Council (which downtown is being refurbished), beyond that we finally get up into forested country. It's still damn hot, though. The air is good, the road isn't too steep or winding.

A bit further up in the hills, the Boise classical music station fades away. We punch the radio button and the next strong signal is a good Mexican station! Ole! We could almost be around Douglas-Bisbee! Ay carRUMba! La treMENda! Oops, the imperfect broadcast equipment keeps cutting out. Tune to 106.3 FM and hope.

45th PARALLEL: Yet further lies the town of New Meadows, at the highway junction to Boise. A wide high valley up here, this definitely has that mountain-town feel. We both looked at New Meadows and thought of Bridgeport, California. This valley also reminds us a bit of the Upper Klamath Basin, minus the lake. A little ways beyond town is a marker for the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. Damn, we still have a long way to drive.

(The BC-Yukon and Alberta-NWT borders are on the 60th parallel, while Fairbanks AK is on the 65th. MacKenzie Bay / Beaufort Sea / Arctic Ocean are at 68.5° north; San Francisco is at about 37.5° north. New Orleans is on the 30th parallel. And Chichicastenango and Copan Ruinas are about on the 15th parallel. Just for comparison, eh?)

Into Idaho County over the Little Salmon River (is it really full of little salmon?) that Mexican station fades away. We see a series of adopt-a-highway signs sponsored by YAHWEH'S 666 WARNING ASSEMBLY. Ay yi yi. Good thing we're just passing through, says Maureen.

Below the Little Salmon is the fork with the big Salmon River, which canyon is large, steep, rocky, and brown. Not really spectacular. I suppose it'd be fun to go rafting down this or the Snake River, which is just west over a mountain range in Hell's Canyon. But it is still pretty hot down here, even in the evening. The mountainscape looks logged and eroded. It's probably at its best in winter and spring, when it's respectively white and green.

WHITE BIRD: Before sunset we climb the steep grade up White Bird Summit, about halfway up Idaho's western edge. We take a dead-end side road and find a wide spot overlooking the Salmon Valley and its surroundings. Awesome sublime wild brown serrated country down there, filled with old villages and battlegrounds of the Nez Perce war. No wonder they fought to stay here, Maureen says; they won the White Bird battle but lost all the others. And now it's cool enough to stay the night.

Saturday 6 August 2005 - NOT HELL'S CANYON
_{White Bird Summit to Powell, Idaho}

Time for her thyroid hormone pills — "Metabolism is our friend," says Maureen. Meanwhile, sleeping in this little housecar can be somewhat problematic, due to various factors.

1. 1) LITTLE BEDS. The beds aren't the most adequate, er luxurious. Maureen's dinette bed is short; my cabover bed's baseboard sags slightly, but I'm OK if I squeeze way up front. So we have a few more crinks to shake out when we rise, a few more than at home.
2. 2) TILTED COACH. The coach isn't always level, especially we just plonk down for a few hours' sleepover. Depending on the angle, one or both of us may feel like we're falling out of bed or having our heads jammed into a backboard. Hang on and sleep!
3. 3) TOO MUCH LIGHT. Even with the shades fully fitted, the windows aren't light-tight. Do you prefer sleeping in the dark? So do we. Good luck. This could be more of an issue as we approach Midnight Sun land. Life in this RV definitely attunes us to our planet's diurnal cycles.
4. 4) LITTLE BUGS. Our window screens may admit some wee tiny no-see-ums. Or an unscreened window may inadvertently be left open awhile. As night falls and the outside world darkens, bugs are attracted by our cabin lights. Some get inside the cabin. They hang around the lights. And when I climb into my cabover bed and try to read by the light just inches over my head, I can study the local insect life. And they can study me. Gnats, winged ants, slim moths, oddments of fliers and midges, a solitary mosquito hawk — I slap at and squash as many as possible but a few survivors usually remain to keep me company. We've noticed that fewer bugs join us at higher elevations. We look forward to ascending the Canadian Rockies, and wonder what the great low Northern Shield region holds in store for us..

HIROSHIMA DAY: Dropping out of White Bird Pass, Maureen spied Lewiston rising from the hot plains in the distance. We swooped through Grangeville for some supplies and are now edging the foothills of the Bitterroot Range, heading towards Missoula. State Hwy 12 goes through some twisty rocky canyons — beautiful within a few hundred feet of the water but logged to nothingness above that.

And I think of a lumberman saying, "Yeah well, we had to cut down the trees to build the houses you live in. You don't like this? Go live in a focking yurt." And I would ask, "How many of these trees went for structural lumber and how much for paper pulp? And wouldn't it be better to grow hemp for paper fibre? And once you've cut down all the trees around someplace like this, would you really want to live here? And couldn't we build houses out of concrete, like they do in Central America and much of the world? There's a lot more rock and sand and gravel available than there are trees, right?"

Except for the dryness, we could be somewhere inland from coastal Oregon. Physically, this is obviously the Pacific Northwest. Grangeville was hot. Up in these valleys, even with not much elevation above the flats, it's considerably cooler. But I'm not standing out in the sun right now, so how would I know?

KOOSKIA: Beyond mountain-village Kooskia we tie into the road over the Bitterroots, following the Clearwater River (wide, shallow and clear) up its wide steep canyon, the downriver region again heavily logged. The hillsides are more forested as we get a bit further uphill. This route, US Hwy 12, is both the Lewis & Clark Trail and the Nez Perce National Historic Trail. The Nez Perce of course were driven away from the area, their lands stolen. A century and a half later we have National Forests and Historic Sites named after them, their arts and culture glorified and exploited. They still have a small reservation here. but this is much more lumber company country than Nez Perce country.

NEZ PERCE, (Nezz-purse) of course, is not what the people call themselves, that's French for Pierced Nose. They're the Nimiipuu (Nee-me-poo). Maureen wonders, when will Native Americans start putting up their own names at their boundaries. The Papago people and country are now rightly known as Tohono O'odham, but I don't see references to a Dineh Nation. First Nations tribal names as officially recorded by EuroMurkans are typically epithets applied by unfriendly neighbors, ie Dog-Eaters or Cabbage-Heads or Those Assholes. Ah, tradition.

Every few miles going up the Clearwater we see a river crossing, usually consisting of a little funicular, a basic car on a cable to run across the river. Probably a bit hazardous in the winter.

The radio options this Saturday morning have thinned out. We can listen to Frick and Frack cracking wise on CAR TALK, or really syrupy Western slop, or a Christian Rock countdown. Or we can hum along with our tinnitus.

LOCHSA: Further up, we see the Clearwater is formed by the junction of the wild and scenic Selway and Lochsa Rivers. Our highway follows the Lochsa, narrower, deeper, the canyon steeper. It's starting to look like an old Hamms Beer ad, the friggin land of sky-blue waters, yada yada, minus the bear and raccoons and skunks and birds etc.

Urgh, I've composed again. !MADRE DE DIOS! (click here)

And further up, just below Lolo Pass, we stop at Powell in a high but hot (around 100°f) campground, hoping to sit out the rest of the weekend. Early afternoon already and we're just too tired to continue. Time for a break.

EVENING: Cooler, but not enough to stay another day. We attended a camp 'program' of interpretive ranger Lem Mitchell telling the sad tale of his Nimiipuu (non-treaty) / Nez Perce (treaty) people. Apparently the film I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER was pretty accurate, which is pretty depressing. At least the language is being taught in schools now.

Uh oh, I've thought again. PHOTO-PENSEÉS II (click here)

Sunday 7 August 2005 - LOL O LOL O LOL O
_{Powell, Idaho, To a Ridge Above Lolo Pass}

We climb towards Lolo Pass between Idaho and Montana. Yahoo! Yesterday was a short day, 150 miles as compared to the 450 the day before, and the 280 the day before that. Today will hopefully also be another short day. We depart camp late, noonish. Yahoo!

We roll up what's left of the Lochso River valley, rocky and not too wide and churning — and clear, except for all that green algae on the rocks. We look in the guidebooks for Glacier Park, which is probably our next destination. It's composed of ancient Precambrian rocks; the only fossils there are blue-green algae. But of course you can get the fresh stuff out of Upper Klamath Lake to mix into your soymilk shake,

C&W CARTOONS: We punch the radio, and up comes a country music station with some loud loud electric honkytonk song about skuzzy whiskey-drinking cowboys etc. And I'm illuminated! "Hey, this song is a CARTOON! So much of modern country music are CARTOONS!" Not cartoon music; the songs themselves are cartoons, simplified farcical fantasies of fictional life. The singer is some grubbified version of Yosemite Sam or Sad Sack or Alley Oop, pretending to wear funny clothes and hat and boots. And what's the difference between farmers' boots and cowboys' boots? With farmers' boots, the bullshit is on the OUTside.

(Not that songs as cartoons are BAD. I write cartoon songs all the time. I just don't have a paying audience. Maybe I need to write more songs about whiskey and trucks and jail.)

ELEVATION: In this section of the Rocky Mountains, the drivable base is kinda low. It's not like Colorado, where the average elevation for the entire state is about a mile; and if you're off driving in the mountains, you're typically at 7000 feet or more. The bottom floor here is closer to 2000 feet and the passes here are at 4000-5000 feet, much lower than we've experienced crossing the Sierra Nevadas in California. So we don't get the cooling of elevation. The daily range here is HOT during the day and COOLING in the evening. We actually got comfortable last night, late enough. And stayed cool this morning, early enough. So we'll just have to adjust our activities and inactivities accordingly.

Meanwhile as we approach Lolo Pass we're back in Land-Of-Sky-Blue-Waters country. Wait, I'm corrected — that would be Minnesota, with 10,000 lakes, all infested with mosquitoes. How did Lolo (Pass and River and Mountains etc) get that name? Well, after you trim all the trees off the mountains, the terrain looks low. Har har har.

Excellent and beautiful little Visitor Center at Lolo Pass; Lem Mitchell is behind the counter. But we don't stay for the programs, instead climbing up the notch past clear-cut mountainsides to a nearby forested ridge with a view and no visitors, a good place to stay the rest of the day and the night. Ten travel miles today, just barely enough, and it IS cooler up here. So here we are.