Hello Everyone!
Well, it’s been a pretty quiet week out here on the road. I spent the first part of the week in Boise before heading west back into Oregon on Monday and then south into Nevada yesterday. Today I find myself in Winnemucca, an interesting little town in the north central part of the state. I’ve been traveling through a sparsely populated area so there hasn’t been a lot to see or get into, but I finished my book (The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides about the last journey of Captain Cook which I highly recommend), got a few walks in and stumbled into some cool little towns. I’ve enjoyed the solitude, the mountainous desert terrain and the peace and quiet.
I spent my time in Boise trying to catch up on all of the photos I took in Washington and Oregon and haven’t gotten to yet before I head off on new adventures. I’ve finally gotten most of them done and you can find posts this week on the beautiful Bavarian mountain town of Leavenworth, the old coal mining town of Roslyn, and Toppenish which is an Old West looking town full of murals on the Yakama Indian Reservation. Next week I’ll finish out Washington with posts from Dayton (which was my favorite little town in the state) and a short post from Granger – “The City Where Dinosaurs Roam”. I only shot one town in Oregon – Enterprise – and I’ll try and get that done this coming week as well which will at least catch me up on my 2025 photos.
I didn’t really get up to too much in Boise. I had a fun night on New Year’s Eve watching the big Potato Drop outside the state capitol building. I actually got to get up close and personal with the potato which was bigger than I thought it was – probably the size of a mid-sized sedan. I appreciated the fact that I could stay inside in the warmth of a nice bar until 11:30pm and still get out and watch the potato drop without having stood in the cold for hours on end. It all seemed very orderly and well done. The rest of the night I just had some beers, listened to the bands play and engaged in some serious people watching. I’ve long since given up the idea that New Year’s Eve is going to be some fantastic, life changing event, but it was nice to be out for it for a change and the places I went were not charging crazy cover charges or raising their prices on drinks so that was nice. 2025 was just such a rough year that I wanted to see it out and let it know it hadn’t beaten me.
I spent New Year’s Day hanging out with an old guiding friend of mine, catching up with him and watching some college football. He gave me some top tips on the area I’m headed towards next and it was fun to hear about everything he’s been up to in the couple of years since I last saw him. Other than that it was a quiet day and an early night.
The next few days were very quiet. I got to the gym every day to start working off the holiday weight but mostly spent time in the library catching up. Boise libraries aren’t as good as what I’ve become used to in Washington and Oregon, but they’re not bad and they served the purpose. On the night of the 3rd I went to see a local musical performance by a band called Dozey Floyd at the old Egyptian Theatre. The venue was great - dating back to 1927 it’s one of the few buildings that survived Boise’s modernization efforts in the 1960s. The band itself was a collection of musicians playing reggae interpretations of Pink Floyd. Sometimes there were a dozen musicians on stage and there was even an orchestra of young music students who came on to sing in some of the songs. It was a big production but very well done and quite entertaining. I really wanted to see The Egyptian before I left and I am glad I did.
I finally felt caught up on Sunday, so I got up and hit the road on Monday morning. I headed out of Boise and then went south, west and then north again to the small little outpost town of Burns. There isn’t much to Burns besides being the biggest town in the area. Burns is in Harney County, the largest county in Oregon and the 10th largest in the country, but there are only about 5,000 people in the whole county. An early Scottish settler named the town after the legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns but it didn’t look like poetry was big in town. There were a few cool murals downtown, but mostly it looked like what it is - a supply town for the surrounding ranches. After a walk up and down the main streets I kind of felt like I had seen Burns and it started getting cold so I headed into McDonalds for a while to warm up and do some reading. The saving grace of the whole thing was going for a drink in the Pine Room later that night. The young ladies working there were sweet and entertaining and it seemed very much like the center of life in Burns.
I got up and out early on Tuesday and made my first stop at the Peter French Round Barn about 40 minutes from town. Peter French came to Harney County in 1872 at the behest of Dr. Hugh Glenn with a thousand cattle and a mission to establish a ranch there. French began gobbling up land by any means necessary eventually running 45,000 cattle on 140,000 acres of land. He built several of these impressive round barns which weren’t really barns at all but were used to train teams of horses how to pull a wagon. By having a large, enclosed space there wasn’t really anywhere for the horses to go so they seemed to learn quickly. French ended up getting into an argument with a neighbor in 1897 and whacked the neighbor with a whip. He must have been used to getting away with such behavior because the neighbor drew his pistol and shot French dead. This was the last of the round barns, but many places in the area still carry the name of Pete French and his sponsor Dr. Glenn, including the small town of Frenchglen. It was cool to see as I’d never seen anything like it before.
Leaving the round barn, I made my way into the Diamond Craters Outstanding Natural Area where I went for a couple of short walks to see some of the namesake craters. This whole area is the product of volcanic activity, and is made up mostly of basalt. There weren’t a lot of trails, but the land was wide open, so I climbed a nearby hill to get a look. As I was climbing, I heard some mooing and turned around to see a whole herd of cattle being driven down the road through the area. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a cattle drive, so I sat and watched and let them all pass before hopping in my van and taking off.
I did stop in the little town of Frenchglen but there wasn’t much to it and then I stopped up on a mountain pass with a fantastic view out at the Steens Mountains which were snow covered and beautiful. It was a nice lunch spot before I continued down into the valley. It was during this next stretch of highway that Shadow Catcher turned 200,000 miles. I’ve only put on about 80,000 of those but buying that van was one of the best decisions I’ve made as it has been a trooper. I made a mandatory stop at the old Fields Station for a highly praised milkshake. It ran me $9 which is probably the most expensive milkshake I’ve ever had, but it was pretty good and enough to feed a family of four. Fields got its start in 1881 when Charles Fields built a stagecoach stop for passengers traveling between Winnemucca and Burns, and today it is little more than that (population 120). The little elementary school in town (“Home of the Buckaroos”) was cute and I was told has a total of 8 students.
As I drove down the highway, I saw some wild horses up on the ridge which was cool as there are far fewer wild horses in the country than most people imagine. I only knew that these were wild because I had read about them the night before so I was on the lookout for them. I also saw about a dozen bighorn sheep which are always cool to see. The mountains all had snow on them, but just a dusting looking like someone had sprinkled them with confectioner’s sugar. The sky was mostly cloudy but as the day wore on there were strange pastel colors peeking through. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen skies that color before but I liked it. The clouds were pretty fantastic, too with all different shapes and colors to be seen. The roads were straight and empty and it felt like I was very small and very alone out there.
I crossed into Nevada in the tiny town of Denio (pronounced “deny-oh”) and stopped there for a chat with the librarian and the surprisingly large local library. She told me the town had once been located in Oregon, but one of the saloon owners wanted to take advantage of Nevada’s lower taxes and more lax laws on liquor and gambling so he put his bar on wheels and dragged it across the border. Slowly but surely the whole town had joined him on the Nevada side. The only thing left in Oregon was the cemetery and when asked if they were going to move that, someone replied that the dead don’t pay taxes and they seemed quite content where they were so just let them be. I did drive back across the border to check out the cemetery which was small and beautiful and there were a lot of crosses made of horseshoes marking the graves there.
The daylight was fading when I left Denio, but the saloon there was closed so I thought I’d just drive until I felt like stopping. I ended up pulling off into a nice little rest area off of the highway for the night. I didn’t have any cell service and I hadn’t looked at that stretch of the drive and didn’t want to miss anything in the dark, so I called it a day and enjoyed an evening of reading my book and thinking about the road ahead. I cooked up some soup for dinner and then called it a night by 9pm (which, in my defense, is almost 5 hours after it got dark).
I was up early this morning hoping for a nice sunrise, but there were too many clouds. There was some more of that weird, pastel blue sky but that was about it. I hit the road nice and early and made my first stop in the old town of Paradise Valley. Paradise Valley was settled in 1863 and originally called Scottsdale but changed its name to reflect its beautiful setting in 1869. It was the hometown of Edna Purviance who costarred in over 30 films with Charlie Chaplin. I’ll bet it looked a lot different when she was growing up. Paradise Valley isn’t a ghost town, but it is about as close to one as you can get while still having a handful of brand new buildings in town. There are some awesome old buildings to be seen, most impressively the 1871 Miccah House. There’s also a neat old National Forest Service camp built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. I enjoyed my walk around town and was glad I made the detour.
From there I made a beeline for Winnemucca. I got into town in time for lunch and then had a little wander, checking out the casinos and stopping into the visitor center for a road map and Nevada guide. The visitor center is in an old hotel building and has some really cool displays in it, including the Buckaroo Hall of Fame. After my wander, I went to the Humboldt County History Museum which was quite good. I learned the town got its name from some trappers who found an old Indian chief when they were coming through with only one moccasin on (called “mau-cau” in Paiute). So they called the place One-a-mau-cau and over time it became Winnemucca (Wikipedia says the word is a Paiute word meaning “the giver”, but I like this story better). There was an amazing mammoth skull fossil there and some cool old buildings and artifacts from the town’s history. I was there for a couple of hours and then ducked over to the library to try and finish this post so that it comes out on time this week.
Tomorrow I will slow my pace down quite a bit as I make my way west towards Reno. I want to check out some of the other small towns along the way and hopefully get a hike in as well. I have friends to see in Reno and then quite a few in the Truckee/Lake Tahoe area so I plan on catching up with a bunch of people out there sometime next week. I’ll probably still be in that general area this time next week, but then I will head off across Nevada on Route 50 “The Loneliest Road in America”. I’ve made that trip several times, but this time I will actually have time to stop and look around. Anyways, I’m excited to be here in Nevada and even though I will be ducking into California for a few days, I’m looking forward to seeing so much more of the state in the next few weeks. I hope you’ll check back in with me next week to see what I get up to, but until then stay warm out there. Thank you, as always, for reading.
-Mike