Sunday: 400 mi (640 km) driven on mostly ramrod straight roads in „rural“ Nevada. It’s been sunny all day and we’ve had it all inbetween 45 and 85 deg. F (7 to 28 deg C) and from -282 to 6,522 ft in height (-85 to 2,000 meters).
We left Vegas in the morning through Red Rock Canyon down into the valley of Pahrump, from there into California. First stop was at Death Valley Junction with the pretty exceptional Amargosa Hotel & Opera House from the 1920ies, today a restaurant and cultural center, in the middle of nowhere. Continuing through the Mojave Desert into Death Valley NP with stops at Zabriskie Point (overlook) with dramatically folded mountains:
On to Badwater Basin, with the lowest elevation in North America: 282 ft. below sea level. It really ressembles an ocean bottom still with its thin salt layer. One can imagine how hot it may become in summer - it was 85 deg. F now! The valley was used in the 1920ies for borax mining and material was transported by muli teams.
Stopping at Artists’ Palette - very colorful mountain formations, unfortunately, not so much at noon with bright light -, took Artists’ Drive then - a very narrow, curvy road through mountains, equal to a rollercoaster ride - and ended up at Furnace Creek Visitor Center. Glad, we had a chance to revisit parts of Death Valley National Park. The one time we've been here before, in 2011, it has rained and it was cold - photos were horrible!
Leaving the NP towards Nevada we climbed up again, on the Beatty Cutoff to Rhyolite. With no residents for more than 100 years, there are just dilapidated buildings (as the railroad station building on the picture) in a unique Wild West setting. It is one of many ghost towns in Nevada.
From Beatty - with the worth-experiencing Happy Burro Chilli & Beer - Hwy 95 went ramrod straight again, without much human settlement or traffic, just some burros and wild horses in the distance. We passed the old mining town of Goldfield, still in the Mojave Desert, with the International Car Forest, old cars, artistically painted and set up, a roadside attraction.
Climbing Tonopah Summit (6,270 ft.) the change from Mojave Desert to Great Basin became obvious, though there were still a couple of Joshua Trees. In Tonopah, The Mizpah Hotel is still a remnant of the formerly booming mining town (main street on the pic below as well as Historic Mining District) and people say that it's haunted and that the ghost of the Lady in Red is living in the hotel.
Wish, Tonopah would have been our destination of the day, because the Tonopah Brewing Company and a great bookstore were really enticing. But since we had to drive another 1 1/2 hours to Rachel and wanted to arrive at daylight, we skipped the thought of a beer tasting and instead drove on, first on Hwy. 6 East, then along the Extraterrestrial Highway, NV State Route 375. Which was a good idea considering the free ranging cattle, which can become a real danger at night. In addition, it gets dark at 5 pm. Also, there was nothing along the route, really nothing, but a handfull of cattle and about five other cars and one or two ranches in the far distance on a total of over 110 miles between Tonopah and Rachel. We were wondering, why Hwy. 50 is considered the "Loneliest Hwy. in the U.S." - to us # 375 seemed even lonelier, or at least more boring.
Didn't really know what to expect in Rachel, NV, where we were booked for the "Little A'Le'Inn Motel" in the middle of moonlike terrain. It showed to be sort of a container village and the bar (also in one of the containers) - featured aliens of all kinds, reports of UFO sightings and other strange things. We were fortunate to still get something to eat (they shut down the restaurant at 6:45 pm), since dinner options weren't really numerous on this day. Our container room was anything but fancy,,, but at least no aliens showed up at night,,, Felt like having landed on "another planet", especially after Las Vegas.
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