This morning I woke up to a nice sunrise at Stough Reservoir, packed up the SUV and then headed to Cedarville to start touring the Barrel Springs Back Country Byway. I explore all 6 blocks of the town and then stop in at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office to make sure the back country road is intact and good for touring. I’m glad I stopped in, they gave me a self-guiding tour pamphlet (attached) and recommended that I take the tour in the opposite direction of what the pamphlet recommends. Made sure I was prepared, as there are no services available on this middle-of-nowhere road, and headed out north. On the California side, the road is paved and travels next to Upper Lake, which is a dry lake most of the year. I explored the tiny towns of Lake City and took a side trip up to Fandango Pass. Fort Bidwell was not as I’d expected. I was expecting a “historical fort” and it isn’t; nothing remains of the fort today and it’s a small town with a few old buildings, but no sign of a military fort. After Fort Bidwell, the road heads east and becomes a graded dirt road and crosses over in to the pretty high desert of Nevada. It was a very nice tour and I think I’ll check out some of the other byways they have listed on the National Scenic Byways website.
Today, I headed east towards Susanville and Highway 395, thinking I’d check out Honey Lake on the way home. In Susanville, I stopped at the Historic Rail Depot and checked out their little museum and chatted with a very nice docent. And even though Susanville is home to a large state prison, it’s a few miles outside of town, so I didn’t see it at all. Next on the agenda was Honey Lake, which shows up on Google maps as a huge lake right next to the highway. Well, it turns out that Honey Lake is a dry lakebed (at least during this time of year) and has no blue whatsoever, regardless of what Google shows! So then I decide to go check out Pyramid Lake in Nevada and start following the GPS to get there. After a few miles on a dirt road, I see that someone painted “Highway to Hell” (it’s okay to start singing now, I did) with an arrow on a rock pointing in the direction I was heading, I double checked my GPS and it really does say “2 miles to Highway 445″, okay I can go 2 more miles before I hit a “paved” highway for the last 30 miles. Well silly me *smacks forehead* this is Nevada and “highways” aren’t necessarily paved!! What the heck, I’ve come this far, I’m at the halfway point, so might as well keep going. I cross into the Indian Reservation and eventually arrive at Pyramid Lake and it is gorgeous! It’s huge and this very beautiful green-blue color with tufa’s on one end of it. I don’t venture down to the lake side because you need recreation permits (it’s on the Paiute Indian reservation) and since I don’t have one, I stick to the “highway”. At the southern end of the lake, the “highway” is paved and it is only about 30 miles to Reno from there. Pyramid Lake gets it’s name from a large pyramid shaped rock in the lake, very cool looking. Definately need to come back another time.
Day 2 of the big storm that is hovering over the area. It looks sort of clear towards the south, so let’s head down Highway 89 into Arizona and try for a view of the north rim of the Grand Canyon today. As I drove across the Arizon strip, it was looking promising, but as I entered the Kaibab National Forest, the snow started coming down. It’s pretty, but it’s cold, thank goodness I’m actually dressed for snow–I knew I brought the snow boots along for a reason. At Jacobs Lake Inn, the half-way point to the North Rim, I decide going all the way to the Grand Canyon won’t be worth it since the visibility is next to nothing in this storm and the storm seems to be getting worse. Back to Kanab, Utah, where I check out the Levi Stewart Memorial in town. It tells about the pioneers and the founding of the town. The rain certainly makes all the red rock look redder, but it’s time to go inside now.
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