And why have I come to the desert in June?

The sun came up and morning makes me feel right with the world even when I haven’t slept much. I headed south through rolling hills, and every hundred feet or so a rabbit turned away from the side of the road and stepped slowly back into the bushes, as if to snub me.

I soon came to U.S 50, the famed Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first ocean to ocean auto route. More recently Nevada state marketers have named it the Loneliest Road in America—not exactly misleading but certainly an exagerration.

The Diamond Mountains rose to my left; I came over Pancake Pass, then down and then up to Little Antelope Pass in the White Pine Range. Soon after I turned onto a gravel road that led to Illipah Reservoir hidden in the sagebrush hills.

As scenery the reservoir was disappointing—a sickly algae-green color, small and shrunken from a considerably higher highwater mark—and yet a number of people were camped on a bluff above the water, and several others were down on the barren shore, standing fishing next to their pick-up trucks. I parked on a small knob surrounded by sagebrush and got out, and indeed I could understand the appeal. The air was clear and morning sharp; for the moment there was no wind, just quiet and stillness, and you could see a long ways. Nearby an old man stepped out of a trailer and walked to a lawn chair stationed on the verge of the low bluff above the lake. He sat down and just sat. Pretty soon a young boy came out of the trailer and ran down to the old man and played around his chair. The old man reached out and put a hand on his head.

When traveling alone I tend to notice—and idealize—just about any human contact. The day before in a non-chain convenience store I’d seen a tall woman wearing Wrangler jeans and carrying a baby reach down to her four-year-old boy and put her hand over the top of his close-cropped head; she turned his head to the left then with a rough but not too rough shove impelled him towards the Men’s room door while she kept moving towards the Women’s. No hesitation, no breaking stride, no words; she knew what she was doing and the boy knew what was expected.

Around the town of Ruth the pale green land changes color. Rust-colored ridges, long and uniform, rise up hundreds of feet, the tailings from more than a century of copper mining. I followed a rough road up to an overlook on the verge of Liberty Mine, a vast, terraced, open pit a half mile across and nearly as deep, shading in color from almost white to dark orange. It’s amazing how much earth people can move around, given enough time and heavy equipment. To counter any misgivings, a sign at the overlook listed the many crucial items in a typical house that are made of copper. So shut up.

In the largish town of Ely I stopped for gas, then maps at the Visitor’s Bureau. North of town I drove up into the Schell Creek Range, the last four miles on a dusty gravel road to the East Creek campground in Humboldt National Forest. At road’s end I found only one other vehicle, a pick-up belonging to two young guys on a butterfly survey for the Forest Service.

I set off uphill, on a fading two-track, sweating in the afternoon heat. Sage gave way to mesquite trees, then a few pines. Above me a high rocky ridge ran north south, dotted with just a few small remnants of snow. I was lower than in the Ruby Mountains the day before, and I missed the alpine scene and snow. Here the ground was dry and crumbly, and the occasional dessicated cow pie told of grazing rights. Deer pellets were everywhere. Humans constituted a third megafauna, though I found only a few footprints, no droppings.

I climbed the slope to near the foot of cliffs, where the faint trail disappeared, then traversed to a ravine thick with mesquite and made my way back down. I found a pair of leather hiking boots, so curled and shrunken by age and weathering that it was hard to imagine they had ever been large enough to fit a person’s feet. I wondered how long they had been in that spot, snowed over and then thawed out, over and over again.

The walk was short, a couple hours, since I still had a ways to go to get to Las Vegas at a reasonable hour. Back in the van I headed south, back through Ely, then down long lonely stretches of road prefaced by signs that read “Next gas 109 miles” and then “Next gas 92 miles.” The elevation descended steadily, and the temperature rose. I thought the van was running hot, filling the cabin with hot air, but no, it was just as hot outside. In a dry heat the wind does nothing to cool you off. The radio said 103. I’d forgotten what that meant, what it felt like, and I wondered why I had thought it would be a good idea to spend late June in the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts.

I came out of the last canyon and spotted the vast Vegas sprawl just at dusk. Heavy traffic carried me through the city to the southeast side and Rob’s house.