Out of Utah, Back to Nevada

Web and I have managed to have quite a few close encounters with animals on this road trip. The free range cattle and their calves were no exception, although they were skiddish:

And this one mooed at us! I mooed back. What a jerk.


I also took a picture of me, taking a picture in the desert before we got back to paved roads.


We got out of Utah soon after and stopped later as a small town in Nevada. Apparently there might we a problem with meth in Nevada, looking at the PSAs.


We stopped for coffee at this place Bella's, it apparently used to be a strip club. Now they serve espresso and giant cinnamon rolls.

Utah Part III: The Sun Tunnels

About 4.5 miles from the Sun Tunnels you stop by Lucin:

According to the Internet, Lucin used to be a town, but all its residents eventually died in the 1990s and since all the buildings have been torn down. Creepy.

From about 2.5 miles out we could see the tunnels, and when we got to them, which was truly the middle of nowhere and like being on an alien planet. Very few people have been to the Sun Tunnels, since you definitely have to seek them out.

Here are all four tunnels, standing 9 feet tall each, and 18 feet long. The only sign of life other than us are those tire tracks:


Let me take you on a tour:

In a tunnel looking to its opposite tunnel:

The concrete tunnels are perforated with four different constellations on the inside, so when the sun shines in them, it creates their pattern inside the tunnel in different ways as the sun moves across the sky:


Web being silly:


Looking out from a small hole to another tunnel:


After some documenting, we played in the tunnels:


Web sustained an injury playing on the tunnels:


He also managed to get a sunburn on his neck.

I managed to take some good pictures of Web in the tunnels:


And uncute ones of myself:


Something very creepy about being 20 miles away from the nearest people and in the remote desert is the total silence, listen:

Utah Part II: The Search for Art in the Middle of Nowhere

On Thursday, June 4th, we headed out from West Wendover, NV back into Utah on a truly obscure excursion: the search for Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973-1976). I first heard about the Sun Tunnels in an art history Western art survey course my freshman year of college. The last time I studied them though was the Fall semester of my senior year where we looked at them more in-depth, and also that whole Earthworks thing. So when I foound out the route from Denver to San Francisco required passage through Utah, I figured, why not go see this monument in the middle of nowhere, Utah? This is really only something someone with significant interest in art would ever want to do.

The Sun Tunnels really are in the middle of nowhere. Google maps doesn't even recognize much of the last part of the journey to them as on roads. The nearest humans are about 20 miles away. And the "town" that the tunnels are southeast of isn't actually a town at all, but a historical marker called Lucin. If you thought you have been to the middle of nowhere, chances are you haven't been on the dirt roads of Utah deep into the desert basin:

(This is still about 10 miles away from nowhere!)

On our way to the middle of nowehere we encountered a dust devil, which is the little twirling cloud of dust to the right of this road:

And it went right past us!

We also past some truly free-range cattle. These guys have no fences, and I don't think they had seen people in a long while, since they seemed a little spooked by us, aka, they actually looked up from grazing to check us out.

Utah Part I: Saltiness

We finally entered Wyoming in the early evening of Wednesday. Utah's welcome sign is pretty exciting, with a skier on there:


The landscape also becomes much more interesting almost as soon as you cross into Utah with cool rock formations like this one:


And these ones:


Utah also has beehives as state route sign symbols. Bzzzzzzz.

Since we were crossing the skinny part of Utah we got to Salt Lake City pretty quick:


It was bigger than I expected. What was really big was the Mormon temple.


SLC is the known center of Mormonism, so we expected the city to be pretty conservative and dull. But in fact, it was far more interesting than much of what we saw in past Midwestern states. There was a variety of dining available (we ate at a decent Greek place) and saw some hippies and hipsters. Much most shockingly, we found the Salt Lake City gay district:

Once we left SLC we drove past the Great Salt Lake. Web thought it was pretty creepy looking. At some points this lake area smells disgustingly swampy like there are rotting animals in still water. At other points it just smelt salty. We also passed what looked like a salt production plant... or at least we hope those huge white mounds were salt.

Near the marshy Salt Lake area we ran into a lot of insects. By ran over, I meant killed a small population with the car on impact.

Kia 836, Insects 0, K.O.