After spending Memorial Day around the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, I made my way further northward in Nevada, to Ward Mountain Recreation Area, just outside of Ely. After a few nights there, I continued on to San Diego for some maintenance concerns, passing through Southern Nevada’s amazing lava fields. I stopped at the Lunar Crater that was quite interesting along the way.
Preface
Although I made one very large post for myself as a personal manifesto of sorts for my travels, this is the first post I am getting back into posting about traveling again. I have been doing a lot of travel through the beginning of the year, but I have not yet been posting about it. Much of the travel has been trialing my setup and writing that manifesto for myself. I have stayed in places in Southern California and Nevada, primarily, including Anza Borrego Desert State Park, Mojave National Preserve, in the shadow of Mt Whitney, and in a handful of boondocking campsites around Southern Nevada.
Now that I have published my manifesto and am really getting into being on the road, I want to start writing about traveling again. I want to try to take from my backpacking trip reports and try to write what I find backwards. Much of my prior travels, I wrote primarily about going to the spot I was at as I wrote. I am going to put it off a bit longer now. I am going to try to tell stories in my own silly way.
It will be difficult to talk about early travels. I stayed at several campgrounds, and it was mostly uneventful except for the rat nest in my engine at Mojave National Preserve. I was able to clean out the nest, but I have had a check engine light on ever since. Of course, I also killed my battery and upon connecting my lithium booster, realized it did not have enough to actually complete the boost. The OBDII code says it is just an ambient air temperature sensor, but who knows? I have been limping around since then, essentially leading to Memorial Day Weekend.
Grand Canyon
For Memorial Day, I decided to go visit the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I was able to pull in late Saturday night and get a campsite in the Jacob Lake Campground, the last available first-come first-serve site for the night. After a miserable night fighting allergies, I got up and drove around the North Rim looking at the sites.
This was far from the first time I spent a day at the Grand Canyon, and I did not take a lot of pictures, contrary to my past styles. To be honest, this one felt more like a kind of spiritual cleansing by the canyon than anything I would take a ton of pictures and act the total tourist over. Instead, I drove around listening to Schopenhauer and just staring at the views on my own. I did snag the picture below for the sake of having a picture, however.
Ward Mountain Recreation Area
After a couple of nights at the Grand Canyon, I spent a night in a hotel in Las Vegas while figuring out where to go next. Scouring the maps and available campgrounds, Ward Mountain Recreation Area outside of Ely, Nevada looked extremely appealing, complete with a well developed campground. I spent a day driving the beautiful views of Nevada to get there and set up camp.
When I first got in, there were no payment envelopes in the front kiosk, but I was able to follow the QR code and the Recreation.gov app to pay for my first campsite. A few hours later, however, the camp host in a USFS truck came up to verify. He filled the front kiosk with payment envelopes, which I was able to use for a couple of extra nights on the first-come first-serve site.
The camp host proved really friendly. When I noticed mice crawling around my engine, he laughed and noted that his new USFS truck did not have any air filters left because of those mice.
I tried to come up with some ways to keep the mice out of my engine, but alas, there was no way. They did not care about my rubber snakes in the dark, though they did in daylight to some degree. They were tiny, cute as hell little assholes that just crawled wherever around they engine they fancied.
Otherwise, not much else happened in the camp, however. I simply had a great camping experience.
As I was packing up to leave, my neighbor came over and told me that they saw my wifi named “subaruvagabond.com” and read my manifesto. He felt the need to come say hi and introduce himself, and we exchanged numbers. Perhaps a new friend.
Lava Fields
While leaving Ward Mountain, I set a course through Las Vegas to San Diego, where I am spending the following week completing some work and maintenance requirements. However, along the way, I made sure to take a route that sent me through the lava fields of Southern Nevada.
I knew about the Lunar Crater mostly because of finding it as a recommended boondocking site. Unfortunately, it is far too hot this time of year to actually stay there long, but in late spring/early summer, it is not a bad medium elevation drive down a dirt road.
The entire area is a beautiful lava field, complete with cinder cones, lava flows, and these wild craters. Usually, the kind of crater made by the Lunar Crater is one that would fill with water and be a fun kind of like. Created by volcanic gases exploding, it is somewhat different from impact craters and the like. However, in this dry desert environment, it becomes like a dry lake on the bottom, and otherwise quite well preserved by lack of erosional elements.
I thought the whole thing was cool. I enjoyed the Easy Chair Crater on the drive in that looked a lot like an easy chair! The whole drive was really cool. US-6 is really beautiful through Nevada.
Readings
Throughout this entire time of travel, I have been reading Schopenhauer. I began with his reprint of the Fourfold Roots of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and then followed up with The World as Will and Representation, reading all volumes. This took up all of the time for the mentioned travels. Schopenhauer is far more conservative than me overall, but I found him to have a really interesting intervention to the idealisms and materialisms of around his time. I was constantly annoyed at his opinions about religion, even though he gets credit for popularizing many Oriental ideas to the Western world. Schopenhauer is not really my guy, but it was a fun read.
Final Word
Although this is not the first travel of starting this new nomadic way, this is the first post where I get to talk exclusively about my travels. The timing also enables me to experiment initially with how I am going to handle some of these travels moving forward.
I am in San Diego in large part due to following an initial plan that my job required me to be in the office this next week. Of course, my job decided to change that to a new plan of being in every 6 weeks right as I was planning my drive into town. Nonetheless, I also scheduled some car maintenance and things, so I am doing that. Hopefully getting rid of the check engine light finally.
This enables me to play somewhat with this post. In this case, I have included my travels to San Diego to some degree, but I am not sure how this will work in the future. I might save travels to a spot for the place that I post about it, except when traveling to San Diego, where I will likely include any travel details at the leaving post.
I plan to play quite a bit with how I post moving forward. I want to try different things and see how it goes. Nonetheless, I have had a good start, really, and I hope this post serves as a good beginning of travel posting again.
Glad to hear you are back out there. Thanks for sharing.