What a day. As soon as we left Milford, UT, we were immediately in the middle of nowhere. The landscape is like nothing any of us have ever seen before. It is stark but mountainous, with huge basins in between the mountains. Nevada has over a hundred separate mountain ranges due to the massive fault lines underneath us, which means we have a lot of climbing ahead of us! We are in the Great Basin, which stretches from Utah to Idaho to Nevada to New Mexico, and it is an area where water, instead of finding its way to the ocean, washes into basin areas and evaporates into the air.
We had several notable occurrances today, which did not include the approximate 30 cars we passed in total today, eastbound and westbound. We off-roaded in the minivan (there's a phrase you don't hear often) to an abandoned mine called Frisco. We saw beehive-like charcoal ovens and remnants of what used to be a lively community and is now scrap metal left rusting in the desert.
We had a herd of pronghorn antelope gallop across the road in front of us while we were riding, and we saw a coyote surveying the land by a river. We also had three climbs in which Molly and Stephanie played the ever-popular categories, with today's categories being 'Foriegn Phrases', 'Cartoon Characters', and 'Names in the Bible'. If anyone has any eclectic suggestions for categories, please send them along as they will be much appreciated in this desert. Carrie is always waiting for us at the top of the climbs with her driving buffet car, and we appreciate her honks as she passes in front of us into the vast nothingness. And when I say nothingness, I mean nothingness:
The sagebrush ocean we are crossing is unlike any scenery anywhere else, and it is quite the adventure to be cycling across it. Tomorrow morning we will hike to see the oldest living things on this earth, which are bristlecone pine trees that are 4,000 to 5,000 years old. That and the open skies are more than enough to amaze.
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