2012/05 Western USA trip - Trip to Virginia City |
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Friday May 25th
By morning we’d had two inches of snow and it was still snowing. The higher lava beds were thickly coated but luckily the roads were mainly clear We had no
heating in the Little Guy, but the insulation is quite good so we were comfortable, at least until we had to get up and put our feet into our freezing-cold shoes. We were off early, hoping to make some miles before the roads got too bad; we were going to be driving through the mountains and I hadn’t brought our snow chains along. It was encouraging that there was plenty of traffic coming towards us, a sign that the roads were open.
John had asked if we could visit Mount Lassen and it would have been our next stop. The park’s volcano last erupted about ninety years ago, so a lot of the evidence, cinder cones, hot springs, sulphur, etc., is still around but not as dangerous as Mount St Helens. Unfortunately, the park road was still closed because of snow and the campground was inaccessible. So we were bypassing Lassen and heading for Reno and Virginia City, and then to Mono Lake, at the foot of Tioga Pass. The good news was that there had been little snow this year further south in the Sierras and Tioga Pass, the eastern entrance to Yosemite, was already open to traffic.
First though, we had to go through a California inspection station. We didn’t have any prohibited fruit but our firewood had to be inspected. I was impressed that the inspector took the trouble to split one of the logs to see if it was housing insects. Most states would just have confiscated it.
The snow continued all morning until we dropped down to Susanville and then we had rain showers and even some sunshine as we drove through the Nevada desert north of Reno. We had the snowcapped Sierras to our west and the lower and maybe warmer mountains of the Great Basin to our east. The MGM Grand that I stayed at back in the 80s still dominates the Reno skyline, only it’s now called the Grand Sierra Resort, but probably still “tacky in the grand manner” as I wrote back then. Probably what we should have done is camp in the warmth of the KOA campground at the back of the Reno Hilton casino, but I thought that nearby Virginia City would be more interesting.
The road up to the town has been greatly improved since I last drove it, but it is still steep, with a great view down to Reno and across to the Sierras. What wasn’t so good was the weather that looked to be coming our way across the valley. I’d hoped to see some of the wild horses that usually hang around on the road, but they’d gone missing.
Virginia City was a mining town, built from the proceeds of the great silver strike, the Comstock Lode. Mark Twain worked there as a reporter early in his 
career. It’s also the “Virginia City” that was often mentioned in Bonanza, though the Ponderosa Ranch was 50 miles away up near Lake Tahoe. Much of the town has survived since the mining days, so it is far from a prettied up recreation of the original; it is still the original, a ramshackle sprawl across the mountainside. That’s part of its charm, but it has some steep and difficult corners and we graunched the hitch a few times before we found the campground.
We were camped in town so we went for an evening stroll on the boardwalk past the Bucket of Blood and Red Dog saloons. We probably should have stayed inside as the wind was whistling blowing light snow up the street.