During August we spent a couple of weeks in Sacramento to take care of some medical appointments and to switch out our summer clothes for fall and winter clothes. Then we set out for our next home in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, just outside Banff National Park. We had planned to travel through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, but due to the huge fires in the Kelowna area of BC, the BC government was encouraging people not to travel through the area. So, we took a more easterly route. We began by driving across Nevada on U.S. Highway 50, dubbed the “Loneliest Road in America.” There are only a few very small towns on a 250 mile drive, so it is indeed lonely and isolated. It traverses the typical basin and range topography of North America’s Great Basin. Much of the desert scenery seemed unseasonably green for late summer. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.
We considered going through Glacier National Park on our way to Canada but Glacier has become over-touristed and very crowded, and we know that we prefer the less-visited parks. So instead, we spent a day in Great Basin National Park (GBNP) near Ely, Nevada. This park encompasses a beautiful area of desert and mountain scenery around Wheeler Peak, elevation 13,065 feet, the second highest peak in Nevada. From Wikipedia, “The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja California.” Great Basin National Park is very isolated and there were few visitors there. In the Visitor Center we mentioned to the ranger that the desert seemed unusually green and we wondered if that was an effect of Hurricane Hilary, which had passed through Nevada a couple of weeks before. But she said that the desert had been green all summer as a result of the atmospheric river dumping record rain and snowfall last winter.
A highlight of a visit to Great Basin National Park is Lehman Caves, discovered by settlers in the 1880s and developed into a tourist destination throughout the 20th century. We took a ranger-led tour of the caves.
We spent two nights in Ely, Nevada, a pleasant but very isolated small town in east-central Nevada, near the Utah state line. We stayed in a funky little hotel that had a small casino attached – no table games, just a few slot machines. That’s typical in rural Nevada, not at all like Las Vegas.
It’s a tradition of ours that we bet $21 ($3 at a time) in the Megabucks slot machine whenever we are in Nevada. Megabucks is a network of slot machines tied together all across Nevada, with a progressive jackpot of at least $10 million. Megabucks is a standard $1 slot machine, but the caveat is that a player must bet the maximum ($3) on a spin to be eligible to win the jackpot. Once the maximum bet is made and the reels are spun, landing “MEGABUCKS” symbols along the payline on each of the reels is what it takes to win the hefty prize. Our largest win was $1,800 a few years ago in Reno, but this time we won about $100. We win just enough money often enough to keep us playing. That’s their hook, right?
Ely has a very nice little railroad museum and we spent a morning looking around. It is very informal and they let you go into the working shop where workmen are performing maintenance on steam locomotives. A cat named Dirt lived in the shop for 15 years until his death in January 2023. The museum is a relic of the Nevada Northern Railway which served the Ely area throughout most of the 20th century when there was a large copper mine and smelter there.
From Ely we traveled through Utah, Idaho, and Montana to reach the Canadian border. We made a brief stop in Butte, Montana, an old copper mining city, to view a huge open pit mine that operated in the mid-20th century. Since it closed it has filled with water that has seeped in, creating an environmental hazard that is continually addressed due to the leached minerals. Just outside Butte we saw Our Lady of the Rockies, a 90-foot statue built in the likeness of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that sits atop the Continental Divide. Just before we crossed the Canadian border we stopped at a rest area for lunch and we spied a little bat in the ceiling of our shelter, taking his daily nap. Before heading up to Canmore we spent a day in Calgary, the major city in southern Alberta. Calgary is a pleasant city, with parks and walkways along the Bow River, which flows down from the Rockies. They even have a botanical garden inside a downtown shopping mall, undoubtedly a welcome respite for folks during the long, cold Canadian winters.
After our day in Calgary we headed toward the mountains to check into our house in Canmore, our home for the next six weeks. We’ll have more on Canmore and Banff in subsequent blog posts.