We are so glad that we took our hike yesterday since today, the wind has blown up and the air is filled with dust. So much dust that it is hard to see the mountains in front of our RV and the sky is hazy. Yesterday it was crystal clear and the sky was so blue.
Today is a day for laundry and bookwork. We’re still trying to catch up with the laundry. We went without hook-ups for a while as we meandered from San Francisco to Baker and, besides, our washing machine is pretty small so we can’t do too much at once.
When we do laundry, we set the dryer to 30 minutes and then take the clothes out when they are still a bit damp and drape them around the ‘living room’ to dry. In Pacifica, CA, we would do a laundry in the evening and, because the air was so humid there, the clothes were still damp in the morning so we just turned them over to get dry on the other side. Here in Nevada, our clothes dry in hours. We can get so many more loads of laundry done in a day than in Pacifica.
As we were sitting in the RV working, we noticed this UPS truck leaving the ranch in back of us. I’m not quite sure of the logistics of the UPS in the middle of nowhere. Do they charge more for shipping? Does a driver make the run out to Baker with only one package or does he wait for more before he makes his run?
As we walked around town, we noticed this metal sculpture. It’s a horse skeleton inside a rusty old car. Someone has a macabre sense of humor.
We also noticed the Museum - and the sign says ‘opening soon’.
There’s a neat shelter which we think is used for demonstrations and talks because it has an array of benches. We were intrigued by the art work above the beams. The silhouettes on the left are from a farm, in themiddle from a cattle ranch and on the right from a sheep ranch. The gist of the whole shelter is water conservation.
One of the signs in the shelter reads:
‘In a region that receives less than 10 inches of precipitation a year, no resource is more important than water. From the earliest Great Basin inhabitants to present day populations, people have moved, drilled and fought to secure their share of this valuable resource.
Today’a ranchers depend upon water. Without measureable precipitation such as rain or snow, the rancher faces a bleak future. Water is essential for good crops and healthy livestock. As thirsty populations grow, so does the region’s need for water. Ranching communities could once depend upon exclusive access to their local area water. But with the possibility of the region’s water resources being reallocated, future access is uncertain. Water will continue to be a vital factor in agricultural survival in the Great Basin.’
Again stressing the need for water and the desire of Las Vegas to reallocate it. Other plaques in the shelter describe ranching and its place in the Great Basin.
I’m cooking pizza tonight since I won’t be able to use my breadmaker nor my convection-microwave oven for a while as we travel across the US back to Iowa. We’ll be staying in ‘campsites’ without access to electricity. Well, actually I could us them but it would require that we run our generator or our inverter to do so and I choose not to do this.
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