Nevada and Idaho

A Note to the Surfer

Having no photos to go with these three days of our trip, and finding the narrative too long to be an introduction to the Yellowstone section, we've made this a separate page for the convenience of anyone who wants to follow the narrative and doesn't mind the absence of photos. Others can skip it. If you decide to read this page, clicking the link at the end will take you to the Yellowstone National Park page, which picks up the narrative where this page leaves off. If you got here by mistake and want to go to Yellowstone right now, click here.

Dining à la Basque

We checked into our motel in Minden, NV at about three and lay around reading and snoozing until it was time to go to dinner. Dorothea was starting to get the head cold that I was just recovering from, so we both needed the rest.

The J & T Bar and Basque Restaurant in Gardnerville (a town into which Minden merges imperceptibly and vice-versa) was great — one of our best dining experiences on the trip. Nevada’s mountains are apparently ideal for raising sheep the way they do it in the Pyrenees, and this attracted many Basque immigrants over the years. Because the sheepherders spent most of their time up in the mountains, they needed places to eat, sleep, and hang out with their countrymen on their rare visits to town, and this caused a number of Basque hotels and restaurants (sometimes called “dinner houses” in the local style) to spring up. I don’t know how much sheepherding still goes on, but some apparently does, and the restaurants are an established feature in some parts of the state. We were in one of those parts now.

The J & T was an unpretentious clapboard building with a lively bar in the front and a big dining room in the back. As soon as we were seated, the waitress brought us a big basket of bread, a steel serving bowl full of white bean and vegetable soup with chicken, and a beer bottle full of plonk — a house red wine that, while it would never make the list at a 7-star restaurant, tasted perfectly decent. When we had each eaten two bowls of soup (though we didn’t finish the whole serving), she brought a big platter of romaine lettuce perfectly dressed with oil, vinegar, and salt, and only then took our orders for the main course. Dorothea ordered Basque chicken, and I ordered lamb shoulder steak with garlic. First, however, there was a big bowl of wonderful beef stew to share, plus a dish of Basque beans — red this time — cooked with ground beef and other flavors. They reminded me of the red beans and rice in New Orleans except that they were less thick (and of course there wasn’t any rice). I added a bit of Tabasco to mine, as I had read that real Nevada Basque shepherds do, and I liked it that way, though I'm sure that the shepherds would have snickered at the amount I used.

The main courses were delivered with an enormous platter of French fries. Dorothea’s chicken was cooked with red bell peppers, onions, and garlic, and spiced deliciously. My lamb shoulder chops (as we’d call them at home) were not only grilled with garlic, but had a dozen or so cloves, brown from the grill, scattered on top. Yum.

A Dutch family (parents and two young girls) sat at the next table. Dorothea (who, because of my lost hearing aid, was the only one of us capable of eavesdropping) heard the father tell the waiter that this was the first restaurant he’d been to in America that served a meal Europeans could enjoy.

After all the courses we’d finished, we were offered coffee and ice cream — a choice of peppermint or pumpkin. We took the former, and its bright flavor finished off the rather weighty meal admirably. I wondered idly if the chef was running the gamut of flavors in alphabetical order, and would be offering the next night’s diners a choice of quince or raspberry.

The whole meal, including wine, coffee (for me) and dessert came to $41.00, tax included. We left feeling replete, but not staggering with satiety as we had feared after Liz’s warnings. This made me feel more confident that we would be up for the next night’s opportunity to eat more Basque food in Winnemucca.

Back at the motel we washed a few clothes and went to bed.

Basin and Range

At breakfast in the motel we shared a table and conversation with an English couple (from Faversham, in Kent) who were about our age. They regretted not having known about the local Basque restaurants, but were now on the point of leaving for California.

Instead of going straight north to Reno on US-395, we detoured east at Carson City to take a parallel course through the mountains by way of Silver City and Virginia City. The latter looked gaudily touristic, but as though it still might be fun if we’d had the time. It was a long climb up to that town, through scenery more striking than beautiful, though there was a front of snow-capped Sierras behind us. (We never got a picture of this, because when we came to a viewpoint turnoff it was full of roadbuilding equipment, and we missed other chances by passing a turnoff before we saw it.)

One enterprising mini-casino in Virginia City had posted multiple signs along the approaches, most of them saying “See you at the famous Suicide Table!” Attached to these were smaller signs saying “We cash paychecks.”

On the other side of the mountains we made a long descent, during which most of the Carson Valley from Carson City to Reno was in view. At the bottom our road merged into US-395, which rapidly became a freeway, and we went from this onto I-80, headed east through a long stretch of Basin and Range.

A good part of Nevada consists of Basin and Range, which is the name geologists give to terrain that has been formed by the cracking of the earth's crust into blocks that tilt up on one side and down on the other. The uptilted side of each block forms a mountain range, and the low-lying land between ranges is a basin. In Nevada the crustal blocks mostly tilt up on the eastern side, so (like the Sierras), the mountains have steep sides on the east and more gently sloping sides on the west.

When we first turned east we had some hills to go up and down, but after that the interstate mostly sidled between mountain ranges as it ran through the Great Basin Desert — a bleak and forbidding landscape for the most part. No river runs out of the Great Basin; water escapes only by evaporating or seeping into the ground. We passed Humboldt Sink, where the Humboldt River disappears in a flat, salty, white plain.

At Lovelock we stopped to find lunch, and wound up in a restaurant annexed to a casino. They served good food cheap, perhaps because (as we’ve always heard) casinos use cheap food to lure us suckers in the door, although — apart from laying the place out so that we had to walk through a dimly lit bar/casino full of glowing slots in order to enter or leave the restaurant or use a rest room — nobody put any pressure on us to join the fun. It would have taken a good deal of pressure; the casino looked thoroughly depressing. But in the restaurant I had a bowl of excellent posole, full of garlicky pork, with a half-sandwich containing four slices of good roast beef, plus a bag of chips, and Dorothea had a BLT and French fries — all for $10.00 plus tip. (We both drank water.)

Afterwards, we read in John McPhee’s book Annals of the Former World that, in 1978 or so, he and the geologist Ken Deffeyes sat in “Sturgeon’s Log Cabin Restaurant” in Lovelock while Deffeyes sketched out on a map his theory of where the next ocean was going to invade North America, while slot machines clinked in the background. Sturgeon’s was where we had just eaten, and it’s no log cabin any more — it has become a mere appendage of the slots — though something pretty good is going on in the kitchen.

The Fleshpots of Winnemucca

It was a little before two when we got to Winnemucca, where we checked into our motel and took it easy for the afternoon. Dorothea was now well and truly afflicted by the head cold. For the first time since putting our first pictures onto CDs in Durango, we found ourselves in a motel room where the TV had the standard input jacks so that we could display pictures on the screen. So we plugged in the Apacer and reviewed a couple of our CDs to get an idea how things looked. This was a good way to check that all the pictures we could remember were on the disks, and the exposure was generally OK, but from the point of view of esthetic contemplation it left something to be desired. The pictures were slightly distorted to fit the shape of the TV screen, and (at least with pictures taken on my camera, which were slightly larger than Dorothea’s) the bottom got cut off vertically composed frames when I rotated them.

The free tourist guide to Winnemucca that we picked up in the motel office touted such attractions as casinos and brothels.

“Cozy Corner Corral is a delight for all who visit. Our ladies are well versed in the art of pleasure....”

“Paradise Cafe — Nude and Semi-Nude Dancing Performed by Ladies of the Evening.”

“The Pussy Cat Saloon has been doing what they do best for a long time and that is why they are so good at it.”

(That last one may have been trying to strike a blow against ageism.)

These quotations are from a double-page ad featuring five establishments all operated (according to the business directory on another page) by “B & D Enterprises,” although nothing in the ads suggested that anything sexually extraordinary was on sale. Everyone in town must know where these places are, but the ad gives no addresses, only phone numbers. It can't be that they don't want to welcome out-of-towners — not only did they advertise in the tourist flyer, but the ad assured truckers that there was parking space (with room to turn around) for 40 rigs.

In order to add visual interest to this part of the site, I scanned in one of the ads from this double-page spread. However, at the insistence of our attorneys, Cavil & Hedge, the phone number has been digitally obfuscated. I thought a simple announcement that the offer was void where prohibited by law should be enough to keep me out of trouble, but the lawyers thought not, and they prevailed.

We noticed that some casinos advertised “liberal slot machines” on their signs or billboards. I suggested to Dorothea that these might be tender-hearted, compassionate slots that try hard to understand the source of your gambling problem, and perhaps return your money if you have a sad enough story. She, on the other hand, thought “liberal” might be just a technical term for a specific type of machine. However, the lady at the cash register in one of the stores confirmed my suspicion that the casinos were merely claiming (falsely, no doubt) that their machines paid off more generously than the rest.

Despite these exciting distractions, we went nowhere in Winnemucca except to our second consecutive Basque restaurant: Ormachea’s Dinner House. Dorothea, who wasn’t feeling well because of her cold, ordered “soup, salad, and side dishes,” which at this restaurant included vegetable soup, mixed green salad, Basque beans, Spanish rice, and French fries — no stew, alas — and no entree. I chose (for $19.50, almost twice the cost of Dorothea’s dinner) all of the above, plus a sampler of three Basque entrees: meatballs, chicken, and solomo (thin slices of pork loin, lightly fried and served with peeled and roasted red bell peppers). The sampler was more than that: one meatball the size of a billiard ball, two big slices of pork loin, and an enormous chicken breast that weighed at least a pound. We each got a glass of wine, both of which I drank since Dorothea was abstaining.

Everything tasted good, but slightly less spirited than the food at J & T. The cooks used much less garlic. The restaurant, too, seemed a bit uptight and refined by comparison. It did have a bar, from which I did once hear laughter, but nothing like the continual hilarity that reigned in Gardnerville. Dorothea, looking around, commented that the place seemed to have been decorated by a woman, and when I visited the men’s room, I had to agree. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen such a nice floral display mounted above the urinals. This one prettily combined yellow silk roses with an old leather horse collar.

Getting to Idaho

Our motel’s continental breakfast offered neither toast, decaf coffee, nor a place to sit down. There was regular coffee, awful orange juice, Nutri-Grain breakfast bars, muffins, and Danish, everything packaged so that you could take it back and eat it in your room. Dorothea heated some water in the in-room coffee maker to make chai for us, using the rooibos chai tea bags she had brought with her in sufficient quantity to last the trip. (Every evening after dinner, and mornings too when we ate breakfast in a restaurant, she would politely ask for a glass of hot water, and I would have to remember to ask for milk or cream even though I seldom wanted it for my coffee.) The chai was good, and so, surprisingly, were the bagged lemon-poppyseed muffins. Granted, they were pure cake, but so are many muffins served on the “free continental breakfast” circuit.

Northern Nevada continued to look pretty bleak from our car windows, though the greenery increased gradually as we moved up the course of the Humboldt River. We passed Elko, where we bought gas, and later stopped in Wells at the 4-Way Café (and, of course, Casino). For a change we ordered potato chips instead of fries with our sandwiches, and they came in barbecue flavor. We would have preferred plain ones, but I sneakily enjoyed the frantically artificial flavor, despite faint vestiges of guilt.

After lunch we abandoned I-80 and turned north on US-93. It was a long, straight road over mostly level ground, the big sky full of ragged clouds. For a while we watched a rainstorm approaching from the west, but by the time it got close, not much rain was coming down — almost nothing reached the ground where we were.

The last town in Nevada was Jackpot, which had several imposing casinos and motels. (If there were brothels as well, they were as discreetly hidden from view as the ones in Winnemucca.) Across the Idaho line, the road showed signs of recent rain, but was soon thoroughly dry. The landscape had been turning greener as we approached Idaho, and we saw on the map that Salmon Creek, which we followed for the last 15 or 20 miles of Nevada, ultimately ran north into the Snake River (and thence to the Columbia and the Pacific). So we knew that we were out of the Great Basin.

There was much more evidence of farming in Idaho, though everything including grass had to be irrigated. They use water from the Snake River for this, and the valley around Twin Falls (named the Magic Valley by local boosters) is famously productive.

We arrived at the motel in Twin Falls at three, or rather four, since we were now back on Mountain Daylight Time. Dorothea’s cold had her feeling low, so she went to sleep while I loafed around reading. Through my preliminary research I had four restaurant possibilities lined up, but one was eliminated because Dorothea wasn’t up to Mexican food at the moment. Of the remaining three, two had closed since the 2003 AAA tour book was published. I found another in the local yellow pages that sounded interesting, but their phone had been disconnected. The only possibility left standing was the fourth on my original list: Idaho Joe’s, where we went and had acceptable but somewhat disappointing home food: chicken noodle soup and meat loaf for Dorothea, beef stew and pot roast for me. The pot roast was good and the meatloaf OK (a few too many vegetable chunks in it, which Dorothea found weird), but both were seriously marred by dollops of heavy brown gravy, which (like the beef stew) gave evidence of having been thickened with cornstarch.

However, I also had two bottles of Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale, an excellent brew, and we both had pecan pie a la mode for dessert — which was so transcendently wonderful that it made up for all the shortcomings of the meal.

Up the Snake

The next day dawned gray and cloudy, with intermittent sprinkles of rain, and we left Twin Falls without stopping to look at the Snake River Canyon or Shoshone Falls, the preeminent local sights. We drove east through the “Magic Valley,” which was flat and green. Irrigation was ubiquitous. When we crossed the canyon on our way out of Twin Falls, we noticed that there didn’t seem to be much water down at the bottom. I had read that they begin diverting most of the water for irrigation sometime in June. There were still three days left in May, but it looked to us as if the diversion had already started.

There wasn’t enough rain to slow traffic, and we made good time across Idaho, following I-84, then I-86, and finally I-15. At one rest stop along I-84 or I-86 we followed a sign to a point where we saw some wagon train ruts left from the days of the Oregon Trail, which followed the Snake River through that region. We bought gas at Pocatello for only $2.05 a gallon, the cheapest in quite some time, and stopped for lunch in Idaho Falls. Dorothea had been ordering BLTs for lunch nearly every day, but the one she got this time was so large that afterwards she decided she’d seen enough of them for a while. In the meantime I was making a mess of my ham, cheese, and egg sandwich. When asked how I wanted the eggs, I had said “over easy,” not thinking to request that the yolks be broken — so of course they gushed forth as soon as I took a bite. I was amazed to see with what care the cook had arranged the eggs so that each half of the sandwich contained one of these surprises.

At a neighboring table sat a tall man of 70 or so in a fringed leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy hat and boots. He had started a loud conversation across the aisle with some men in the booth next to ours, and eventually moved over to join them. The subject was ranching. We wondered whether this was his first chance in months to converse with another human being — his wife sat at the table with him, but for all the attention she paid, it seemed possible that she had given up talking to him years ago. She had probably heard enough of his booming chitchat to be at least a bit fatigued with it.

After lunch we left the interstate and headed northwest on US-20 toward West Yellowstone, Montana. The agricultural scenery was briefly interrupted by a stretch of lava beds — a relatively thin layer that was breaking into basalt blocks, but had enough soil either caught or formed on top of it to support a grassy covering. These lava beds were very extensive to the west of the highway, and included a park called the Craters of the Moon National Monument, but this was too far out of our way to visit.

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This section last updated 12-13-2004