At 110 million square miles, Nevada is about 20 million square miles bigger than the UK, but only has a 30th of the population, and most of them are concentrated in a few larger cities. No surprise that US government (hereinafter referred to as They) own/manage about 90% of the land and use it as the military's private playground.
As my journey continued across this massive state things did start to get a little wierder. Travelling past a sign pointing to the 'US Naval Centroid Facility' got me wondering what the hell the Navy were doing out in the desert 600 miles from the ocean. It seems I'm not the only one.
The massive spaces and greyed out areas of Nevada seemed to lend themselves an increasingly surreal quality to my trip. I was shadowed by a massive eagle across a valley for about 15 minutes at one point (maybe They had bio-engineered it as a surveillance device). Away across the plains suspiciously regular dust trails and random dust devils danced on the limits of vision.
As is my want, I took the long way round between Austin and Fallon. The trip from Tonopah onwards got pretty hairy as the wind had whipped up massive dust clouds. The huge volume of charged particles into the air caused massive lighting strikes and ultimately a huge rain storm to lash aross the valleys.
Camping at Grimes Point outside Fallon was also slightly surreal as it was another petroglyph site. Today, the Navy train their Top Guns out of Fallon Air Force base a few miles down the road. Every 20 minutes or so the thunderous roar of pairs of F18s or F35s ripping their way into the sky would contrast fiercely with the knowledge that thousands of years ago a very different type of hunter would have been pausing to scratch his thinking on bison capture tactics into the rocks below.
No comments:
Post a Comment