Stir crazy on the grasslands of Nebraska

There's a lot of grass in Nebraska. After a peaceful and picturesque overnight car-camp in the middle of it, the long long drive South East back towards Wyoming and Colorado began to take it's toll....

Interesting road name nose following part 3

This time towards something called 'Toadstool Geologic Park'. After negotiating a textbook 1/2 mile long train crossing and 11 miles of track spearing off into the middle of nowhere, I found myself arriving at this location straight out of a doctor who episode.

Close encounters of the iconic kind

No visit to Wyoming would be complete with stopping by one of the most iconic natural / unnatural formations in the World. If you haven't seen Close Encounters Of The Third Kind go get it and see what Spielberg was up to before ET.

Diggin' on human power in Wyoming

America loves the motor car (well in fact they love girt big trucks masquerading as cars), so much so that most touristy places I go end up with a 1/2 mile exclusion zone around the car park beyond which 80% of Americans will not walk.

This is A Good Thing because it means the application of a little human powered activity i.e. walking or, in this mornings case, paddling, results in accessing proper wildscapes without screaming kids, revving engines, yakking people or white socks pulled half way up to the knees.

Sulphur and furry backsides in a still active caldera

It could only be Yellowstone National Park. One of the few places in the US that have never been fenced or farmed it's also one of the first National Parks and treasure trove of just about any kind of geographic feature you care to name. Plains, hills, mountains, canyons, forests, lakes, rivers and marshes all sit inside the 40 mile wide caldera left behind by massive volcanic eruptions 2 million, 1.2 million and 600,000 years ago.

Much of the park is basically sitting inside the crater of a supervolcano ready to go off beneath it. The magma close below the surface results in extraterrestrial surface features like acid burned basins, sulphur spewing vents and superheated rainbow coloured pools caused by all the geothermal goings on.

Experimenting with roads and kites

I have found Idaho to be harder than any of the preceding states to sniff out places to overnight in, or at least the options feel limited because so much more of the state is given over to fenced off ranch land. Maybe it's a relic of the fact that early settlers got this far and couldn't face the depradations of the Oregon Trail further west so simply set roots on this side of the Cascades. Either way, I've had to work harder to find the good stuff. Having said that, when I have, the results have been entirely worth it.

The only human in 100 square miles

On the way back down from the mountain forests of Sawtooth, the peaks gradually lose height, the trees thin out and the landscape starts flattening back to plains and rolling hills. A little real map planning had a small road, ID46 leaping out at me to link back to the US20 East. Halfway down the road, out of the corner of my eye I saw a tiny sign for 'City of Rocks Road' pointing off to a winding track to the West. Game on.

My own private America

Dolpin or Bedouin ancestors, you decide

Get off the map and stay off it

Spent 4 days touring round the depths of the National Forests of Klamath, Shasta, Trinity and Lassen, a huge area of mountains and forest taking up most of Northern California. In the process, I have become adept at snaking out awesome spots to overnight at, preferably with a river close by for morning dips. Had some epic drives, which completely blew Sat Nav Lady's mind (or maybe it was the canyons, fog, switchback roads, deep forests). I lost count of the number of legal U-turns she was desperate for me to make to force me back onto main roads. The more she does it the more I relish ignoring her..

In which I visit Endor

Do you ever have those moments when something seems to reach into your brain, grabs a fistful of consciousness then yanks you out of your meatware to really appreciate where you are or what you're doing?

As I'm an old geezer who remembers turbo buttons on computers and the gently glowing 66 that meant you were a player, I get it frequently when holding a modern mobile phone; the sheer computing power stacked into something so small, the array of things it can do. Camera, calculator, diary, video camera, music player, organiser - and it makes calls too. Take yours out now and really think about what it's taken to put all the stuff in the palm of your hand. If you don't find yourself thinking isn't technology amazing, you're not concentrating hard enough.

My first sniff of the 'real' Pacific

Technically, scrambling about below the Golden Gate Bridge should count, but somehow the fog and grey-ness that day didn't feel real. As I travelled North from San Francisco, climbing through Mount Tamalpais state park got me some fantastic above the clouds views and then later sheer distance from fog trap of the bay at Point Reyes seashore got me proper Pacific up close.

Like many things I'm finding on this trip, it's the little things that can catch you out when you shift cultures to another country. For example, if you ask for a side order of something in a restaurant in the US, you'll often have it delivered as an appetiser, rather than as, you know something on the side with your main dish (go figure). On the roads, you can turn right at a red light if it's safe and overtake on any side on the freeway. The point I'm making is that some stuff you take for granted or do automatically in one place, can have dire consequences in another.

A Michael Jackson tribute, fireworks with naff narration, the scent of Mary J...

..it must be July 4th in San Francisco.

14 (mostly) white guys called Foreverland pulling off the best of Michael Jackson. Several thousand people on the grass of Aquatic Park, some smoking meat based items on BBQs, others smoking matter more vegetable in nature, both combined scents permeating the atmosphere. Nicely bombastic fireworks display, but diminished by overly naff intro speech and over-loud backing Americheese music. Still, crowd seemed to enjoy it. Good times.

What is it with me and lakes?

Lake Tahoe sits square across the Nevada/California border. 22 miles long, 12 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep it sits over 6,000 feet above sea level. Crystal clear waters, framed in a mountain basin surrounded by pine forest, make a spectacular setting. Now my official route says to stay on the US50 around the South of the lake, but as always, the long way around looks way more attractive. Pretty much as soon as I turn North, the views of the rock strewn shore get me itching for a little swimming excursion.

Another day, another dune - but this one had eyes

After I took this video, I settled down to watch the stars come out. The skies are massive out here, there's no light pollution becasue the nearest towns are so far away. About the only familiar constellation I could identify was the big dipper/plough, but the sheer volume of stars is pretty mind blowing. Usually there's too much crap in the atmosphere to pick out much, but when there's so little cloud, it's pretty much a straight line for those ancient photons to hit the back of your eyeballs. The Milky Way is clearly visible as well. As we're edge on to the galaxy, looking through it from the rim of the spiral arm we're in means the sheer density of stars gives a cloudy effect. My poor old Panasonic Lumix FT2 wasn't quite up to the job but plenty of others with better gear can show you what I mean.

Up on the crest of the dune it's very peaceful. It takes about 2 hours for the last of the sun's light to completely vanish from the sky so it's an unhurried process. I was lying flat on my back looking directly up into the stars and enjoying the gradual change in the velvety black night and deepening violet of sundown. So relaxing in fact that I dropped off and fell asleep, waking suddenly at about 2 in the morning.

In the heart of conspiracy country

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.

Welcome to the Hotel Nevada

I'll say one thing, there's no shortage of rest areas and basic unmanned campsites about in which one can park up and snuggle down. This night's room with a view was at the Hickison Petroglyphs - a site of prehistoric paintings and marked rocks - about 15 miles East of Austin, Nevada.

Flat can be Fabulous

As I left the environs of Salt Lake City, the landscape started to settle down into long open plains and scrub-strewn desert punctuated by fins and fingers of mountain ranges that funnel and squeeze any need for corners out of the roads. Crossing the ancient now (mostly) dried out Sevier Lake bed West of Delta was beautiful as the marshy waters lie still in the windless air, mirroring the skies above.

Zen and the art of Route Planning

Heading west from Moab towards the Pacific, the idea was to follow the "loneliest road in America", the US50, A.K.A. the backbone of America. It snakes its way across what would have been the orginal frontier of the Wild West through prospecting boom and bust towns, classic plains and mountain ranges emerging into suburban California.

The 40 mile detour I'll never regret

Travelling down US191 towards Canyonlands National Park, my eye was drawn to a sign labelled 'Needles Overlook'. The Needles are one of Canyonlands most famous areas, stuffed with fins and spires, so I thought it would be worth a look. When I turned off at the indicated point, I was met with a sign saying Needles Overlook, 20 miles. No prizes for figuring out that's a 40 mile detour there and back...