Somewhere In The Sierra Nevadas its 343pm

Just got back from gathering a mountain of dried sage branches for the fire tonight. I expect it will be pretty cold, we must be somewhere around 8000 feet. The campsite is a perfect little hidden away spot next to a creek, with a rock firepit and the truck leaning one tire on a rock to make it level.

We’ve had a few spots like this, like in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where we parked in an old hunters campsite next to a creek and enjoyed absolute solitude. In fact, save for the hijinks of a tiny town called… shoot, something forgettable, maybe 500 people, two markets, both way overpriced, we’ve enjoyed absolute solitude for a while now.

The past three nights we’ve been back in California, camping in Death Valley National Park. All three nights we did back country camping, driving up treacherous roads, more bumpy and messed up than anything I’d ever driven, to camp out in these vast flats of desert, with no one around, maybe a coyote off somewhere, a few kangaroo mice, ravens. Death Valley strikes as odd at first, not much going on, just desert, but quickly as you turn the corner on the valley itself, it is this vastness of solitude and permanent warmth in the day time that is quiet, strange, and surreal. The colors of the sand and rocks are layered and warm, collapsing down from 11,000 foot peaks (Telescope Mountain) to the lowest point in the U.S., near Badwater, which is 282 feet below sea level. You can see millions of years of history, even if, like me, you have no idea of geology at all.

We spent the days rolling in the warm air through desert roads, in shorts and t shirts for the first time since Sandwich, on the east coast. The light is so intense it colors everything in slightly deeper hues than usual. And most of all the quiet, the sense of space, of mystery, of time sits hushed in the nights, especially at our desolate and beautiful campsites, just me, Kate, and the Truck among millions of sage and mesquite plants, rolling endlessly toward the layered mountains. Everything looks close, but in reality, what looks like it should take five minutes to walk could take three hours. There seems to be nothing small in Death Valley save for the towns, the outposts for radiator water and in our case, Miller High Life.

This morning I woke to the sunrise, the warmth of the sun already pushing into the camper shell across the great cool of the night before. We made coffee on the tailgate and sat like spectators to the vast empty ancient beach before us.

I think yesterday I was in one of the most strange and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Its a dried up ancient lakebed called The Racetrack, so known because the rocks that mysteriously are on its surface leave long twisting trails, indicating that they’ve moved, seemingly of their own intuition. The lake is just dried mud, miles of it, all cracked into tiny hexagonal shapes, natures favorite, endlessly stretching beneath and in front of you. As an experiment I closed my eyes and walked for ten minutes, not needing to open my eyes at all… the lake is one of the flattest surfaces in nature, and there are no obstructions in any direction once out on it.

Before Death Valley we had the strange “luck” of revisiting Las Vegas. We decided that from Canyonlands National Park, in Southeast Utah, that it would be more fun and just as fast to cut down to Vegas and up the way we are now (Hwy 395 heading to Tahoe).

We got ourselves a cheap (but surprisingly nice) hotel room at “Circus Circus”, one of the older, more tacky, and yet, more, how do you say, nostalgic of the Vegas Strip casinos. We rested up in the room, reading, writing, and headed out once again for the Strip. This time, it was bearable. I learned that to judge the Las Vegas scene in any way is too easy, and completely redundant. You can’t knock the tackiness and utter desolation of a place that prides itself in exactly those things. And so we just wandered, from casino to casino, taking in the kitsch, spending 7 dollars on slot machines, losing it all, and returning, exhausted to our hotel room.

Losing 7 dollars in Vegas is not as bad as it could be.

We spent two nights camping in Zion National Park. Zion is packed full of awe inspiring mountains, red and orange, strange peaks rising from the river that runs through the middle of it. Its best seen in the middle of the night, next to a river, with the moon bright and lively out, as we found out. We had time to kind of take in the basics, a walk up the canyons, along rimrock trails, past emerald ponds and tiny waterfalls, and warm breeze nights at the crowded campsite.

***

So after Death Valley we were clearly in our final stretch. We were in California towns with California people, California license plates, California attitude, ie., easy going.

In short, the trip is coming to an end, and it is nearly impossible to be sad about it. We find ourselves now in South Lake Tahoe, at a $25 motel, the last scheduled stop on the trip. Today was kind of a toss up, we didn’t get much sleep at all last night, the biting Sierra Nevada air crossed well below freezing, and even in our normally invincible sleeping bags it was chilly, often sleepless. In the morning we made a fire out of dried sage branches, made the coffee, and headed up to Tahoe.

Its hard to visualize, let alone vocalize, the final stage of the trip. Its something I kind of continually want to talk about, evaluate, figure out. And yet, my mind can’t really grasp not camping out every night. Can’t grasp what is to come next.

I want to offer a grand summary of the trip: Seven months of two American kids out on the road, dazed, impressed, broke and beautiful, finding what we could where we could, doing our best to live it up. And we have, we’ve lived it up for all its worth. We embody the lifestyle now, dirty jeans and thermals, a dirty truck packed full of memories and essentials. No clue where it goes to next. How to do it again. No answers, but nearly a year of doing exactly what we wanted to do. To see America. To live a life void of regret. To feel the air and the sky and the sun on our skin. To feel the weight of the road pass below us like nothing. To vacate our souls into campfire after campfire. Sure of one thing, certain of the trip. Alive and proud. Unbelievably free. That’s what we do here. That’s what we’ve done.