One Tank Road Trip, Part 1

We’re setting off from the Berkeley Marina on one of my favorite road trips in the western United States.  We’re going to be following Highway 50, the route of the old Pony Express, east across California and across the state of Nevada.

And we’re going to do it driving a Nissan Altima hybrid.  The idea behind this is to see how far we can go on a single tank of gas before we run out of gas.  I don’t know how far we’re going to get.  We’ll find out.  And that’s part of the story.

Highway 50 actually starts in Sacramento and continues all the way across the country.  We follow it over the Sierra Nevada, the first of nineteen or twenty mountain passes we’ll climb in the course of our adventure.

We soon reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada.  But for us, the journey really begins a little bit further east, where Highway 50 earned its nickname as the “Loneliest Road in America.”

But it’s hardly lonely when we reach the city of Fallon, Nevada, an agricultural community with a population of about 8300.  It’s roughly 60 miles outside of Carson City and 280 miles from our starting point.

Among other things, Fallon is famous for its Heart of Gold cantaloupes.  And we happen to be passing through during its annual cantaloupe festival.

The festival features sights you might see at any country fair, plus just about anything you can do with a cantaloupe.

There are cantaloupe eating contests and even cantaloupe bowling tournaments!

For bigger kids, there’s the Cantaloupe Chunkin’ Contest.  In the human powered division, the object is to hurl one of the melons as far as you can.

I decide to try my hand, but instead of chunkin’, I choke.

That doesn’t stop Dave Fisk from inviting me to join his crew in the catapult and trebuchet division. 

We’re up against some serious competition, though Dave is the defending world champion.  His trebuchet is a metal dragon with bungee cords.

The goal in this division is accuracy, not distance.

“You’ve got to hit the barrel,” says Dave.

The other teams come pretty close, and our efforts are off the mark.

The folks in Fallon have one more method of propelling cantaloupes: using air cannons.

After having way too much fun in Fallon, we resume our journey.  There seems to be nothing but empty, wide open space on the horizon.  However, as we head east, we also venture into a romantic part of our country’s past.

Sandwiched between Highway 50 and Sand Mountain, an imposing dune often crawling with ATVs, are the ruins of the Sand Springs Pony Express Station.

The stone walls of Sand Springs were once part of one of the most storied legends of the American west.  It’s remarkable that the Pony Express looms so large in our memory.  It only operated for 18 months in the early 1860’s, doomed by the advent of the telegraph.

Highway 50 traces the old Pony Express Route.  It was also part of the original transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway.  Just east of Sand Springs, it leads to Middlegate Station, a piece of the old west that is still very much alive.

We arrive at Middlegate Station, 307 miles from Berkeley, with more than half a tank of gas left.  Middlegate is one of our favorite spots along the Backroads.  It’s been quite a while since we’ve been here, and it’s good to be back.

Middlegate Station has been around, in one form or another, since the 1850’s, when it was an open structure presided over by a couple of grizzled prospectors.

You can still find real live grizzled prospectors here now.

Though the building is much more comfortable than it once was, it’s still authentic.

“All the walls are over a hundred years old wood,” says Russ Stevenson.  He and his wife Fredda have owned Middlegate since 1985.  It’s now a bar, café and motel.

According to Russ, “We want to stay where we were, though, back in the past.  And keep the past – bring it into the future, but still be the past.”

“Things outside here are unchanged,” says Fredda.  “The hills are still the same.  The plains are still the same.  The wild horses that run by here all the time – still the same.”

One old tradition Fredda and Russ have revived is that of barkeepers holding money for customers.  Their ceiling is covered in dollar bills with the names of people from all over the world who placed them there.

“It’s theirs until they want to come and take it down,” explains Russ.

In fact, when we first stopped at Middlegate back in 1994, Russ invited me to leave a dollar on the ceiling.  Now he’s helping me look for it.

We never do locate my old dollar, but we do find an old friend, a prospector who calls himself Gold Dust Bob.

Bob says, “I got a hundred million out there, but it’s still in the ground.”

Bob was here during our previous visit.  It feels as though he never left.

“I can come here and go to sleep if I want to, and nobody bothers me,” he says.

Or he can pick up his guitar and serenade us, which he gladly does.

With regulars like Gold Dust Bob contributing to an atmosphere that Russ and Fredda have carefully cultivated, it’s easy to imagine stepping way back in time.

Russ says, “I like to sit out on the porch in the evenings, and just hope that a ghost of a Pony Express rider will come riding by, throw his mochila -- mail pouch -- out there, and here are these other ghosts loading him on another horse, and the other riders switching mochilas with him, and he takes off, riding on by.  I hope I see a ghost doing that.”

For more information on Fallon, Nevada or the Fallon Hearts of Gold Cantaloupe Festival, held every Labor Day weekend, please visit http://www.fallontourism.com or call (775)423-4556

Sand Mountain Recreation Area - Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
(775)885-6000
http://www.nv.blm.gov/carson/Recreation/Rec_SandMtn.htm

Sand Springs Pony Express
Click here for website

Middlegate Station
Located about 50 miles east of Fallon on Highway 50.
(775)423-7134
http://middlegatestation.net/

BKR7262

One Tank Road Trip, Part 2

We’re working our way across Nevada, seeing how far our Nissan hybrid will take us on one tank of gas.  We’ve used less than half a tank so far, and traveled just over 300 miles.  We leave Middlegate, and very quickly we see the next thing we have to check out: a tree bearing some unusual fruit.

Legend has it that when a new bride threatened to walk out of her marriage, her husband said she’d have to do it barefoot, and threw her shoes in the tree.  The couple is supposedly still together, and hundreds of people have followed their example.  The tree is now bursting with footwear.

This is high desert country, where the road seems to go on forever.  But there are a few towns along the way, including the old mining metropolises of Austin, with the second oldest church in Nevada, and Eureka, with its 19th century courthouse and its splendid opera house.

We’ve still got plenty of gas left, and we press on to the city of Ely, nearly 525 miles from our starting point.  Casinos on the outskirts of town give way to a series of murals depicting the area’s history.  And a slight detour puts us right inside one of those pictures.

“A hundred years ago, this would have been the busiest place in eastern Nevada,” says Sean Pitts, the director of the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum.  Sean continues, “The building was built in 1907.  It was named at the time the grandest railroad depot in the state of Nevada.”  It’s now part of the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum.

“Four and a half million people rode this railroad during 35 years of passenger service from 1906 until 1941,” Sean asserts.  But the train’s primary purpose was shipping copper from nearby mines.  After the mines closed and the railroad was shut down in 1983, local citizens persuaded the mining company to donate the facility to the town.  Today it’s managed by two sister organizations: the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum and the Nevada Northern Railway Museum.

“There’s 52 acres.  There’s 60 historical buildings and structures.  And we’re probably the best – the most intact railroad short line in all of America.  If you want to see what railroading was like in the early 20th Century, there’s no better place in the country to come to see than right here,” Sean claims. 

When the shutdown occurred, all the workers thought it would only be temporary.  “And so they left behind all of the tools.  They left behind all of the documents.  They left behind the buildings, the rolling stock,” Sean explains.  And all of that is now here for us visitors to see, including a ten foot tall rotary snow plow and a massive 1907 steam wrecking crane.  And it all still works! 

“The power of this place is it’s not recreated.  This is real.  This is a real working locomotive.  This is a real working machine shop and engine house.  This is real grease on the floor.  Be careful where you step. This is real stuff,” Sean adds.

It’s real and we can do more than merely look at it.  We get a ride behind Locomotive 40, a 100 year old steam engine.

“From a period of let’s say the 1850’s to the 1970’s, everything society did was tied in with railroading.  You could call this the internet of its age, because it just opened up frontiers, it opened up continents,” says Mark Bassett, the Executive Director of the Nevada Northern Railway Museum.  He’s in charge of the railroad, which is nicknamed the “Ghost Train.”  Mark explains, “The railroad is actually a ghost of itself.  During the heyday of the railroad, they had 32 passenger trains a day, 60 ore trains a day and then a couple of freight trains mixed in there.”

These days the Nevada Northern Railway operates from April through January on a much less busy schedule, sometimes powered by diesel, sometimes by steam. 

It’s a challenge for Mark and his crew to keep this hundred year old equipment working.  “There’s no operator’s manual for Locomotive 40!” Mark jokes.  But they also want to pass this knowledge on to others.  “What we’re trying to do is recapture a technology that we’re in danger of losing.  And if we lose this, then that locomotive won’t run and you don’t want that to go away!”  And with Mark, Sean and other dedicated souls working to preserve it, it’s not likely to go away anytime soon.

Meanwhile, we can all ride on the Ghost Train, have a wonderful time and get connected to a piece of technology that changed the world.

East Ely Railroad Museum
(775) 289-1663
http://dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/museums/ely/ely.htm

Nevada Northern Railway Museum
(Please call in advance for schedule.  Train runs from April through January.  Generally, the steam train runs on weekends and the diesel locomotive runs on weekdays)
(775) 289-2085
http://www.nevadanorthernrailway.net/

The Middlegate “Shoe Tree” is located about a mile and a half east of the Middlegate Station on Highway 50.

BKR7262