Hiked Donner Again

Went to Azalea Lake with Dad for lunch on Sunday. Nice little alpine lake, not very big. Very pretty though. Nice and cool up at Donner Pass. It has gotten near freezing every night, but reaches 70'F every day. We ate lunch on this rock at the south end of the lake. The mountain in the distance is Castle Crags, which is volcanic and sits atop the granite which underlies most of the high sierra and is what most people are thinking of when they think of these mountain peaks. It is mostly granodiorite and monzonite, if you care. White granite with biotite mica. It runs with some chemical variations, for hundreds of miles south, and another 90 miles north to the Sardine Lakes at the Sierra Buttes, where it terminates at the Mohawk Fault and the Feather River. The Yuba River starts west of this spot around 5 miles away, somewhere.

 Interstate 80, which is about a mile north of this lake and you can hear if you listen hard, is a major artery. Due to a fire on Echo Summit, Highway 50, a smaller but tourist used road through the Sierras, was closed, causing a massive traffic jam over Donner Pass, which I ended up stuck in for 45 minutes for what should have been a 20 minute drive to highway 20. Then the brief speed of 20 was ruined by a caravanist towing an ultralight behind a slow Jeep and it kept dropping to 40 mph on a 55 mph road. We were 8 cars behind this bozo who ignored every paved pull-off and he finally turned down to Scotts Flat Lake. Every time I think I can warm to the idea of owning a trailer and pulling one, I get a nice road and see a jerk like that and it all goes out the window. Then, and showering. Your RV and trailer have about 20-40 gallons of water on board, and most have a 5 gallon water heater. What kind of shower do you take in a 5 gallon tank? When you are in high country, you get hot and sweaty and there's suntan lotion to remove because its sticky and itches after a while. I want my hot shower, dammit. Obviously, the answer is a proper house or at least a cabin, with insulation, a proper hot water heater tank, no need to carry tanks full of pee. I own a good tent, and a stove. If I want to camp in the woods I can do that easily. But I don't. It is uncomfortable. I don't enjoy wife swapping or junkies getting weird in the woods with shrooms or hash. I already know how to cook so sampling low grade mountain eateries with a spouse that hates to work isn't exciting for me either. At least I know, and I got credit for the research on RVs and I know how much it costs. And I agree that getting stuck in a crappy community sucks. But I need my 740 to 800 square feet and a 40 gallon water heater to be happy, and a full sized pantry and kitchen so I can cook wonderful food. I think I'd be happier with those, and possibly a 4WD for visiting interesting places with great views on the weekend, and a race car for ones that are paved, and still be very happy.

Pretty, right? 

See why people in Nevada are so happy? They like their outdoors. Most don't gamble. That's mostly for tourists. And yes brothels are legal, but they aren't exactly illegal in California since most aren't sought out or suppressed either. I'm told that the Nevada Highway Patrol likes ticketing California motorists speeding on their long abandoned roads, but I never had much trouble with them on my visits there. Then again, I LOVE the desert. I love the big open empty places where you can see for 150 miles and people are found near the green bits in the big brown landscape. Few people can find nice things to say about Nevada, but the people saying them are usually heading for some kind of green bit, often on the side of some sea. I think Nevada would be improved by castles built of stone to various classic designs, however they have a lot of small earthquakes and Nevada has more volcanoes than California does. They even generate power from a steam vent east of Reno along I-80. Since the steam is generated far from where it is harvested, this arrangement is stable, completely different from the Geysers in California, which are messed with a lot and are also venting arsenic in huge quantities and its killing the Jehovah's Witnesses welders who work at the plant who were told that protective clothing would be enough, not knowing that Arsenic turns into a gas when exposed to oxygen, also called Arsene Gas and is a deadly poison. And it absorbs through lungs and exposed skin. So no, protective wear isn't enough. Anyway, castles in Nevada would look awesome on those peaks. Rich loons should build them like monuments. And monks should build them. They would be hilarious. Give them battlements and arrow slits. Why not?

The drive back from my trip, despite all the traffic, had some interesting points. Hot August Nights car show in Reno ended on Sunday, so the hot rodders returning to California were driving on the same road with me, and there were lots. While I don't see the point of GTO copies with silvery metallic paints and no particular suspension (which is why there aren't very many of them left: they rolled back in the 1980's and the drivers mostly died). The cars that survived the 80's somehow got their engines fixed up and new paint and all shiny and they go to the Hot Rod shows like in Reno. Those which could be driven were in the same traffic as I was. And they looked pretty at 20 mph on 80, bumper to bumper. There was no actual cause. When we got to the end of the traffic after a 45 minute crawl down the pass, there was nothing to see. We just sped up and a Lance truck camper on a new $50K Dodge Ram 3500 truck who had taken I-40, which runs alongside 80 because it used to be the only road through Donner Pass 50 years ago, had to merge back into the same traffic again when their road ran out. LOLs. Oh well.

I do understand this is the last hurrah of that generation, celebrating what they loved about an era of unprecedented wealth and debts handed down onto mine. They don't think about that, because they had jobs of their own. They think mine are failures because we are paying for all they took. They don't know they were stealing, and wouldn't believe you if you proved it to them. It will be one of those things for the history books to explain to the Millenials and younger generations. Our poverty caused by them selling us down the river. Inherited debt. Sigh.