West Virginia Trip

August 5-12 Grady and I went to West Virginia and Virginia and Pennsylvania and had a marvellous time with our wonderful children and grandchildren.  Here are some pictures that show how much fun we had.

Trip to Angel Lake and the Ruby Mountains

There is a road going from Wells to Angel Lake that is the scariest road in America, even worse than The Highway to the Sun at Glacier National Park in Montana. It is this little place and the guidebook we read does not mention anything about what it really is all about, and our photographs and videos did not do it justice. But there are no guardrails, and it ascends thousands of feet and you look down into a huge valley with the road you just ascended winding down on several levels below you, and just scream out of fear. We loved it! And we also loved the Animal Refuge Center at Ruby Lake, which is a series of marshy little ponds with lots of birds. The Ruby Mountains themselves are gorgeous and exotic looking, with lots of diverse shapes and colors. All along the highway anywhere in Nevada are millions of wild mustard bushes in bright yellows and they give everything a cheery aspect. The smell of the fresh sagebrush is wonderful as well. And the vastness of the landscape--the feeling of being "off the beaten path" pervades every drive. This is a wonderful state! We have enjoyed our stay enormously here, with Elko as our home base.

The guide book warned us not to try it in a passenger car, but as we got closer to the 90-mile dirt road, we decided to just step into the waters for a bit and get our feet wet. "We'll turn around if it looks too hard," Grady said. "What do you think?" And I wanted to at least attempt this little-traveled path. As it turned out, this was probably one of the ABSOLUTE BEST roads we have ever been on, with heart-stopping scenery on the one-lane dirt path, as we looked over the sides of the sheer drop-offs at about 8700 feet. We enjoyed the shadows of the trees, the mountain peaks, the amazing rocks, the Jarbidge River gurgling alongside through the valley at the bottom, and even the little town, where we stopped to use the bathroom in the Inn/club. It took all day, since we could only go at about 10-15 miles per hour, but it was something I was really glad we saw. We did not meet many people on the road. There were a few places I was a little scared because the gravel seemed to push us off the road as we slid a little bit, and that was scary, but the many switchbacks were not too bad, and the road was not rough like the guide book had warned. We only scraped the bottom of the car once and it was not a bad bump. There is no way that photographs captured this trip adequately, but I did take over 350 shots yesterday, and Grady took 7 videos. Best of all, we had wonderful conversation together, and it provided a memory for the rest of our lifetimes that we will not forget.