Driving to Salt Lake City – the fastest way – involves getting to Highway 80 and mindlessly blasting east for two six hour days. The first leg of the blast is driving north thirty miles to San Francisco, then, getting serious, we turn right, go through the Coast Range in the general area of the Sacramento River delta , across the Great Central Valley, into the Sierras. It is a trip I have done hundreds of times and watched it urbanize a little bit each year.

Now, on this trip, we pass through the Sierras, past Reno, into and through the Humboldt Sink to Winnemucca, Nevada; mostly in the dark as is our way. Two thoughts keep reoccurring to me as day fades into night, Nevada is underappreciated and everyplace is a long way from Coastal California.

We spent the night in Winnemucca Nevada in an unmemorable motel after an unmemorable dinner served by a young Mexican woman with impeccable, accent free, English which, she said, she got from reading a lot. The next morning, we drove east for 124 freeway miles to Ely Nevada for breakfast.

We are on Highway 80 which very roughly follows the California Trail – of Donner Party fame – which, itself, was following the Humboldt River as it flows west into the Humboldt Basin. The Humboldt River is the largest River in Nevada and it flows for about 250 miles across the top 1/3 of Nevada.

Elko is an surprisingly wonderful little city – OK, very little city – that features the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering each January and has over a hundred street murals. The Poetry Gathering is sponsored by the Western Folklife Center and, by all accounts, it is terrific. And I say that in all sincerity.

After Elko, we are back on the road again.

As we drive through Eastern Nevada, we see several bridges over the highway that seem to go from nowhere to nowhere. I think that is the point, they are wildlife corridors that allow migrating – or just curious – animals to cross the highway. Increasingly, humans are starting to realize that this planet has not been put here for us to destroy.

We are starting to realize that we are not the only worthy animals on the planet. Some people even believe that all life is valuable – and I count myself among them – and needs to be considered when making decisions, especially infrastructure decisions. In Los Angeles they are now building a wildlife corridor over the I5 connecting the isolated Santa Monica Mountains to the wildness of the San Gabriel mountains, essentially because the Santa Monica Mountains mountain lion population is genetically isolated. The estimated cost is 90 million dollars and it is inconceivable that, twenty years ago, any official agency would have even considered this.

We pass through West Wendover Nevada where people coming from the east get their first chance to gamble and then Wendover Utah where people can’t gamble. Then we drive past the Bonneville Salt Flats where we had expected to watch some very dedicated hotrodders trying to break various arcane speed records before they were rained out. From Bonneville, it is a long straight haul to Salt Lake City, arriving in the dark.