Fear and Loathing in Tonopah

December 2007

I bought my first DSLR.

I have been shooting 35mm slide film since I got into photography in 2000. On my two previous trips I also used a little point & shoot digital camera for documentation snapshots and other stuff that I didn’t consider film-worthy.

DSLRs have been available for a few years but the prices have been very high and the picture quality not good enough until recently.

Palo Alto. Tunnel under the railroad tracks.

When the holiday break arrived, I was ready for a little road trip to try out the new camera on an old friend: the sand dunes of Death Valley.

I also wanted to see some of the ghost towns along the way in Nevada.

Stocked up on food at Trader Joe’s in Reno. One of the benefits of roadtripping in winter is that the car trunk can be used as a refrigerator.

Gabbs

On the morning of day 2, I drove east out of Fallon and tried to find some of the ghost towns I had circled on my map.

Berlin

This town site is set up as a historical monument with an entrance fee, but most of the buildings were locked up for the season.

And that was all for today. There were other sites in the area but I could not reach them because the roads were covered with mud and snow or looked more like hiking trails than roads.

Austin

became a town in 1862 after someone’s horse accidentally kicked up a piece of quartz containing silver. It was getting dark and I didn’t want to drive anymore. Austin has two motels and one of them was open.

I checked in then went for a walk on the icy main street and watched a large full moon rising.

A song with the line “she’s a daddy’s girl in a mommy’s world” drifted out of one of the bars.

Now I have a need to get that song into my iPod but I have no idea what it’s called or who sings it. Googling didn’t help.

Went for another walk in the morning to see the town in sunlight, which didn’t last long.

This dog is now in my apartment.

Just kidding.

He looks like the kind of dog I might have though.

Over the mountains to the east, there was a storm brewin’.

I left town as the sky darkened and headed for the other side of those mountains.

It began to hail on that mountain pass.

Manhattan

Belmont

This bar is for sale.

Tonopah

When the sun was starting to set, I called Travel Lodge or some such place about a room. I was told it was 79 dollars, which seemed way too high for Tonopah. So I got courageous and checked into this place instead.

I stepped into room 108 with fear and excitement doing cartwheels in my bowels

but there was nothing clown-y about the room.

No clown pattern quilted comforters, no clown embroidery on towels, no clown mold bath soaps, no clown porn cable channel... It was surprisingly decent and spacious. I decided to stay here for the next two nights and use it as a base to do some exploring.

I asked one of the motel owners, Bob, about some of the roads I might be on. He was quite friendly and helpful. When he found out that I was spending the next day alone, he invited me to have Christmas dinner with them. He mentioned an 18-pound turkey. He also showed me a picture of his daughter who is a retiring showgirl in Vegas. I couldn’t think of an appropriate response for that.

I accepted the dinner offer, just for the company and not the 18-pound turkey.

I got up at dawn to get all I can of winter daylight and rolled onto the highway following the setting moon.

Silver Peak

I didn’t see anyone in this town... except for one man who drove up in a golf cart and asked if I saw his emu. I did see an emu earlier. It just followed me and stared without a sound as I walked along the fence, and I wondered what it would have done if there were no fence.

When I went back to the motel office to pay for the second night, another one of the owners (the one who was in charge of roasting the 18-pounder) also invited me to the Christmas dinner. I guess it’s something they do to all of their guests who are alone on Christmas.

However, “dinner” was at 2 pm, so I regretfully declined and went back on the highway toward Crescent Dunes, which is a body of sand I had never visited before. There are no road signs for the sand dunes and the road to it is not on my detailed map. Bob had told me that even the locals rarely come out here.

From here there is a dirt road that leads to the sand dunes barely visible to the northeast. That road reminded me too much of a sandy road I got stuck in 7 years ago, so I got out and started walking. But the dunes were too far away and the road seemed to be stable enough, so I got back in the car.

As far as dunes go, this one is pretty good. Too much vegetation is what makes a sand dune unphotogenic, and this place has miles of pristine sand.

However, offroading is allowed here and even a few ATVs can ruin a lot of the surface pretty quickly with tire tracks.

And even in this remote location, there was one truck which had brought 3 ATVs. I made use of whatever clean surfaces I could find and did not stay long.

It’s a good thing that I decided not to walk the few miles on this dirt road because this is an open range and although I did not see any bulls on my way in (I did see countless mounds of shit though), many of them had gathered on the road while I was out on the dunes. I would not have felt comfortable walking past these bulls. Some of them were larger than my rental car.

This is my Christmas dinner. Most of my meals were like this because restaurants were few, scary, or none.

The room has a microwave oven and I savored the rare luxury of hot canned food.

Early next morning I bid farewell to the folks who came so close to being my surrogate family on Christmas and headed south toward Death Valley.

Gold Point

Dead bugs

Despite the sunny skies, it was very cold.

Booked a room at a casino in Beatty, which is where I usually stay while visiting Death Valley, and went to Scotty’s Castle. I first heard the story of this castle in the middle of the desert on TV in the early 90s and I had visited a few times but this was my first time inside.

The inside can only be seen on a brisk guided tour and there isn’t much time for photos. And tripods are not allowed. Most of the rooms are kept dark to protect the furnishings from light.

Death Valley

Around 2 o’clock I set foot on the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells. These dunes are easy to access and no offroading is allowed. I spent many weekends here during my 3 loooong years in Southern California.

The last time I was here (February 2007), dark skies and sand storms kept me from getting any pictures. This time, just as the sunlight was about to get good, a long asshole cloud got in the way and stayed there.

But I stayed on the dunes in vain until sunset, then drove back to my room in Beatty.

I came back to the dunes at dawn. No asshole cloud this time.

I love being here in the morning after the night winds brush away the footprints.

I left the dunes when the sun was too high and its light no longer romantic then kicked back here and there waiting for sunset.

Here I am at a place called Artist’s Palette. I sat in the car and watched people come, pose for pictures, and go. There’s more to Death Valley than sand dunes but sand dunes are what keep me coming back.

And the silence. I don’t remember experiencing a silence so vast and absolute before I came to Death Valley.

In that silence you can walk on the ripples of a frozen ocean and think of cheesy melodramatic things to write in your blog when you get home.

Next morning I returned for 4th and last round. And I am not a morning person, so I must really like this place.

But the last time I was here, I wondered if I might be done with sand dunes. Maybe I had my fill. Maybe it was just something to do to keep my mind from dying while living in Orange County and it was time to leave it behind.

I think I was wrong.

There’s more for me to find here.

This is a place where so much beauty can be found

in that fleeting moment just before dark.

I left the dunes and drove east over Cerro Gordo Mountains and stopped at the nearly-ghost town of Darwin.

Then went north on the 395.

Manzanar

is the site of a World War II Japanese-American prison camp. It is a desolate and narrow valley between two snowcapped mountain ranges, which probably made escape futile.

Luning

I veered northeast away from Tahoe to try a route I hadn’t taken before.

Hawthorne is right next to an army depot and much of the town is plastered with the designer colors of patriotism.

Room rates were going up by the day in Reno as it got closer to New Years Eve.

My last planned stop before heading back to San Francisco is a friend’s house in Crescent Mills which is a little town in the Sierras. I had a few hours to spare and decided to spend them in Virginia City. This is a view from the narrow, winding road that got me there.

The TV show Bonanza is what made Virginia City famous. Like all popular boomtowns, this place has a knottsberryfarmed main street with the usual souvenir shops, saloons, and old tyme photo labs.

I quickly turned off that street to take a look inside this church, then noticed a sign nearby that read “historic radio museum.”

I don’t really have an interest in radio equipment but I am glad I stepped in here. The entire collection is the result of one man’s obsession. Henry, the owner, has been collecting this stuff since he was a teenager and opened this museum shortly after moving here 15 years ago.

It is almost always a pleasure to come across someone with a genuine passion for something.

Tucked away behind a curtain is Henry’s workshop, where he rebuilds radio equipment.

Although everything in here was quite foreign to me, listening to the way he spoke about them made me appreciate what I was looking at.

I didn’t spend much time looking at the town itself but I put Bonanza in my Netflix queue when I got home.

I had spent about 3 hours in that museum so I hurried to get to Crescent Mills before dark.

I stopped in the town of Quincy to get a picture of the only movie theater in the area, but there was shit in front of it.

After waiting for about half an hour for the shit to leave, I gave up and went to my friend’s house, which is where I have spent several winter holidays over the past few years. I’m usually there by Christmas Eve but I was a few days late this year.

Quincy is only about 15 miles from Crescent Mills so I went back the next day

then spent the rest of the afternoon alone on a leisurely drive.

We had a mellow New Year’s Eve at home then I was on the road home the next morning. It was a brief and quiet visit without pictures

except for this one of the kids looking out as I was leaving. I was told that they, kept asking when Uncle Keith was arriving. Although I don’t really play with them, I guess they just got used to me being there this time of the year — like stockings hung by the fireplace, home-made chile rellenos, and snow storms.

With sand in my shoes and photos in memory cards, I made the tedious drive back to San Francisco.

A storm came to town soon after I got back. I stayed inside for days looking over the photos. I kind of miss having to wait a day or two to see the pictures after returning from a trip but I do not miss the hours of scanning, cleaning up dust and scratches, and accumulating binders of slides that need to be organized and stored.

The three pictures below were taken inside Aria, an antique shop in North Beach.

It used to feel good to come home to SF no matter how fun the trip was, but after two years back in the city, it doesn’t feel like that anymore.

This place feels dirtier and more crowded after every trip.

Maybe it’s just the lack of sun (it’s still raining) or the heavyfooted neighbors whom I often daydream of telekinetically throwing out the window or the rising cost of tiramisu that’s making me feel this way... making me picture a gigantic wave crashing in and washing it all away like a night wind over sand.

Maybe it is time to leave

then come back at dawn.

About a month after the trip, I received a citation in the mail which claimed that I drove on the 91 Express Lanes (in Orange County) on December 25 without paying the toll. I guess they misread a license plate number in a traffic cam photo and that just happened to match the one on my rental car.

I sent a letter to refute the citation. With Christmas in Clown Motel as my alibi and Bob as my witness, it was difficult to write that letter with a straight face.