In the ’80s, my parents would hitch up our old trailer to his even older Ford pickup, throw my brother and me in the back, and haul our family over the Sierra Nevada mountains and often deep into the Nevada desert for our yearly summer vacation. The pattern was always the same: get to some dusty remote location, set up camp, and stay put until it was time to head home a week later. Dad was content sunbathing with a book or squeaking away for hours on his fiddle while mom us kids played and explored together.
For reasons he can't recall, we ended up at Fort Churchill, NV on a number of these trips. We'd swim in the Carson River, walk the railroad tracks that went through the park (and sometimes dodge trains), listen to the coyotes, watch the jackrabbits, search for horned toads under sagebrush, play around the old adobe structures, and hope for evening thunderstorms to blow through. Sometimes my dad would hunt and cook rattlesnakes, but that's another story.
Formative times which forever cemented this weird corner of NV into my DNA. Returning always feels like coming home. There's a clarity with thoughts in the desert, a connectiveness that's harder to tap into with the hustle and bustle of urban living.
We stayed up late hoping to catch the Perseid meteor shower, but only saw one shooting star amongst a sea of stars and satellites. We slept poorly in the heat and woke up shortly before sunrise. With sore backs and groggy minds, we got ourselves dressed and hit the trails to catch the old adobe structures in the dawn light—a first for me here.
The plan had been for two nights at Churchill. While the sleeping was marginal the first night, at least there was wind as a storm blew by to the east. There was also only one other couple in the entire campground, making it feel like we had the run of the place.
We left for the afternoon, heading south through the town of Yerington and then on to the tribal community of Schurz where a gem store caught my eye. I love chatting Nevada geology with locals, and John, the co-owner of Rockchuck, was amazingly gracious with his time. Perhaps our next trip to this area will entail dedicated mineral hunting.
We hit more lonely highways, appreciating the A/C and moonscapes, ending back at the campground mid-afternoon right when the heat was at full tilt. Gone was our quiet campground as now most sites were filled. RVs and trailers filled our once serene campsite views, their loud, humming generators overpowering the sounds of the ravens, doves, and crickets we'd appreciated a day earlier. Most critically, the wind that had given us some relief the day before was no more.
We made lunch, and I tried to take a midday nap only to find it impossible with the heat and sweat. Logan rightly suggested we head back out again for an A/C-fueled venture, and it was around this time we started toying with the idea of packing up our gear and hitting the road. It was 100°F where we were and mid-60s back at home. We turned around, went back to the site, packed up, and hit the road—again taking some scenic byways, then through Reno, back over the mountain, and home by 10:45.
26 hours in Nevada. No regrets, really. It's a joy that such a weird and wonderfully diverse desert land is only a 4-hour drive from home.
