On The Road : May 13-15th, 2005
Journals
We spent the first night of the drive at Rabbit Valley, about 2 miles from the Utah border right off I-70. Nothing there but high desert, and a bunch of mountain bikers. The KTM racing team showed up right as we were getting ready to leave-nice dirt bikes! We hit the road pretty early Saturday morning: beatiful weather for the drive across Utah and into Nevada. Due to the Tioga Pass Road (eastern access to the park) being closed in Yosemite, we had a choice to make: northern or southern route. Either way adds 200-300 miles on back roads. FYI-Tioga Pass road opens between mid-May and early July depending upon the snowpack-looks like it will be on the later side this year due to a 180% of average snowpack this year in Yosemite. We had planned to take the soutern route through Las Vegas, but thanks to some good advice from our friend Mike, we changed our minds and took a more direct route on US-50, the Lonliest Highway! I-70 terminates at I-15 in Utah: at that point, we got on US-50 and headed straight into the middle of Nevada. We've driven to Las Vegas several times, and also across Nevada on I-80: both of those parts of Nevada are total desert. Not so in the middle of Nevada-we crossed mountain range after mountain range, beautiful valleys in between. A high-desert environment, but we were amazed at how beautiful. And the mountains-let's just say that there are plenty of first descents to be had out there, and they had the snow to back it up! Although the traffic on this section of US-50 is sparse, there is a town with gas at least every 100 miles. Keep in mind that US-50 traverses the country from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco, California-before the Interstate Highway System, this was the only road across the country! We spent Saturday night on Bob Scott Summit at 7200' smack in the middle of Nevada, outside the town of Austin. Sunday we headed on towards Yosemite-it wasn't long before we hit Carson City, and re-joined society. From there, it's on around the south side of Lake Tahoe, cross into California-don't bring any fruit from Salt Lake City (there's a border station in California were they search you for contraband fruit!) Fruit and vegatables from Colorado are OK, so we headed into the Sierras-scenic back roads all the way into Yosemite. Total distance from Lawson, Colorado to Yosemite via this route is 1150 miles.
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