April 21 – Monday
We packed up the trailer and drove over to site #1. The campground host told us that we could use the host site to dump and fill our fresh water tanks. He was camped in the upper campground because the box elder bugs were hatching and he didn’t want them all over his trailer. Box elder bugs are a real pain. They multiply faster than any other bug I know and don’t bite or really bother you but they can get into your electrical systems and mess them up. They can grow up to about ½ inch and are black with red markings. We had them all over in Riverton. Sure enough the bugs were everywhere! We weren’t there long enough for them to bother us and after we took care of our tank business we headed south to continue toward the west coast.
We filled up at the Flying J on I-15 just south of Spanish Fork. We were so happy that the gas was only $1.51. I had just heard on Paul Harvey that gas prices had just come down six cents so were glad that we found a place that reflected that.
We left I-15 and turned off on Hwy 6 and drove southwest. As we drove the scenery became more and more desert like. We eventually came to an area named the Sevier Desert and traveled across this for several hours. It was very sandy but not just sand. There was sagebrush and desert grasses but no cactus. I think the desert cactus must be more south. Right in the middle of the desert was Sevier Lake. It was dry but it didn’t look dry because of an amazing mirage. The sun was glaring on the white sand and it made the lake look like it was full of water. It must have been awful for the settlers crossing this way to be so hoodwinked.
We came to the Confusion Mountain range and it was such a nice break from the flat never ending dryness. The highest peak here was Notch Peak and it was 9,725 ft. You could immediately see how it got its name as it had a big notch down the middle of it. There was very little vegetation but we began to see cedar trees and brush that looked like mesquite trees. We didn’t see any sign of a house or town for the 80 miles across this part of Utah.
We finally made it to the Nevada border. I took a picture of the Nevada state sign and saw that the price for gas at the gas station there was $1.89. We almost had a cow! At the gas station there was also a restaurant, a casino, a motel and an RV park. There wasn’t anyone at the park and I understand why! It was windy, cold and dirty looking.
We knew that a little town called Baker was near where you enter the Great Basin National Park so we thought gas would be a little cheaper there so we headed that way. There was only one gas station in Baker. The gas was $1.89 and it didn’t even have an attendant. It was a 24-hour place to get gas. All you had to do was use a major credit card! It was so weird. Besides the pump, the only thing there was a little building made of plywood boards with no windows. Very creepy.
Baker is really small. It looks like the town makes all its income from summer jobs at the Park. There were a few houses but mostly mobile homes, several restaurants and a few touristy cabin places.
After we filled up with gas we headed up the little road to the park. Someone with a lot of imagination and a lot of time on their hands had decorated the barbed wire fence for the five miles up to the park entrance. They took all kinds of stuff and made little scenes every few yards. There was one that was dozens of sunglasses, several scenes had alien masks with different hats on their heads and one had a unicycle with shoes on the pedals like someone was pedaling it. It was so fun to watch for the next one and it was nice to have something to look at because there was sure nothing to look at in the scenery, pretty much the same old scrubby desert stuff.
We entered the park and turned where the sign showed us the direction to the Lower Lehman Campground. Our information told us that it was at 7300 feet and as we drove up the 8% grade road it started to snow. 
We were really starting to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into when we saw the sign to the campground. We pulled in and drove around the small loop but only saw one site that looked half way level that was long enough for our trailer.
We decided to try the one other campground that was opened this early in the season called Upper Lehman Campground and drove on up the 8% grade another mile. We almost got trapped in this one as it was steeper and had more turns than the first one. After a lot of backing up and pulling forward and pulling out our hair we drove back down to the lower campground to site #1. All this time it had been snowing really hard and the only reason we didn’t go into panic mode was that so far it hadn’t been sticking at all.
We got all set up and even got the awning out. We finally were able to come in at 10 at night. We were really tired and worn out. It had been a long day.
April 22 – Tuesday
We were surprised to find that the outside temperature was only 33 degrees when we woke up. It had seemed so cold the night before! Our campsite is really nice. Here we don’t even have water, as it is still too cold to turn it on. There is a nice pit toilet down the street a ways. There is even has a little shelf, a hook and a mirror, which is rare. Pine trees and wild rose bushes surround our campsite. There is just a tint of green showing on everything. It will really be beautiful here in a few weeks.
We set all our clocks back an hour to Pacific time. It was a little bit of a shock to our systems as we had only set them up an hour a few weeks before. It would take a while to get used to the time changes and the fact that as we made our way further west, the sun was setting later and later. It was actually good to set our clocks back because the sun was setting at 8:15 and it was only April. Now the sun is setting at 7:15 and that seems more normal. When we left Ft. Collins it was only setting about 7:00.
It snowed about a half inch around lunchtime. It was a really beautiful snow with large flakes coming straight down. The high was only in the upper 30’s but it didn’t seem all that cold.
I went out and gathered a few pinyon cones. Pinyon nuts are a big commercial resource here. The park allows personal gathering of up to two gunny sacks in the fall but no commercial pickers. The nuts are imbedded in the cones and grow all over the trees. There are still lots of cones in the tops of the trees but the nuts have popped out. They are little oval bead shaped about the size of the end of my pinkie. The ones that I found in the cones are moldy and black. I hope we can find some to buy so I can see what they taste like. The cones that I saved are all opened up and have tree sap oozing at the ends. It is really messy but smells just like Christmas.
Later in the afternoon the sun came out so we drove up to the upper campground to check it out a little better. We saw six deer. They look a little different than the deer we are used to. They are mule deer but they have black around their ears, a black tip on their tails and their legs are longer. They were really scruffy looking since they were in the process of losing their winter coats.
April 23 – Wednesday
We woke up to a winter wonderland with two inches of snow on everything. It was 30 degrees.
We are running the Honda a lot but it is really quiet and not bothering anyone since no one else is camped near us. Three motor homes came into the campground yesterday but they all left this morning. One was from Texas. We never got the chance to ask them where they were from. We were sure curious about them.
About mid morning we drove up to the Visitor Center. It was a really nice place with a large room with lot of great information, a café and a gift shop. We learned that up on the summit there is a Bristol Cone pine forest of trees that are the oldest living thing on earth. They look like old gnarled wood that would wash up on the beach. They are very slow growing and some have been recorded to be over 3000 years old. We weren’t able to drive up there, as the road wasn’t open yet.
That afternoon we decided to go back to the little border gas station and see if we could get any service on the cell phone but we didn’t have any luck. 
We saw that they lowered their gas price to $1.82 so we filled the van and the little gas can for the Honda. We bought some ice cream and headed back to the campground.
On the way we stopped at a little archeological site that was about a mile out in the desert all by itself. There were some picnic tables, a pit toilet and a board telling about the site. It was the digs of a Fremont Indian Village. From 1991 to 1994, the site was worked on and archeologists uncovered the walls that made up the village and they also found shards of pottery and utensils. It was hard to understand how anyone could possibly live out there for very long but the information said that the desert floor used to be a lush valley but the water had been rerouted to ranches and farms over the years and the desert floor was different than it was 700 years ago which is when the Fremont people lived in the area. Very interesting place to visit.
April 24 - Thursday
The sun was shining when we woke up. What a difference a day makes! We wanted to be outside all day. Glen worked around the trailer and straightened up and reorganized the back of the van. I got out the tablecloth and my lawn chair. The campsite looked so homey. We hadn’t been able to really enjoy being outdoors at all since we left Ft. Collins. It actually got up into the lower sixties. I took some pictures of some of the first wildflowers. I picked a few of the tiniest blooms to see if I could dry them. I got my plant book out and found that the 
little yellow flower in the upper left corner is a yellow montane violet. I am not sure about the violet flower in the right hand corner but it looks a lot like a type of phlox or geranium. It didn’t match either one exactly in my book. I couldn’t find the plant in the lower left hand corner but it the most common. It grows everywhere.
After lunch we drove up the mountain on the road that had been closed until today. It circled at an 8% grade around to eventually get up to Wheeler Peak but they closed it up to the 8000-foot elevation sign. From the road we looked out over the valley and could pretty much see forever. We could see Notch Peak, which we had passed on the way across the desert. A park rancher told us later that it was 70 miles away. We were pretty amazed that we could see that far so clearly.
Later in the afternoon Glen fired up the Honda and we made a pot of coffee with the Mr. Coffee. What a nice luxury. We were just about to pour the first cup and two of the park rangers stopped by. Glen went out to talk to them and they had a nice visit. They said that our camp looked so nice that they thought we had been park hosts before and offered us a position. We felt very flattered and think we might take them up on their offer sometime in the future after we have traveled a bit. We took their card and information to add to our file.
About six o’clock we drove on up to another part of the park that had just been opened. We drove down a little gravel road until we came to an area called Grey Cliffs. There were pictograph caves throughout the cliffs and people apparently liked to climb in and around them. I saw my first Indian Paintbrush. They were bright red and very squatty and low to the ground. I didn’t have my camera with me. Maybe we will go back.
April 25 – Friday
Today started out nice but just as we started cooking hamburgers on the grill at noon the winds started blowing. I spent the afternoon inside working on the journal and then we drove down to Baker to mail the first copy. The lady at the post office was so nice. She is the first person that we have met in town that doesn’t seem odd. She must have been a little lonely because she seemed to want to talk and kept thinking of things to tell me about the area. Just as I would be about to leave she would start talking about something else. She really helped me a lot with one thing. We have decided that Steffy can send us a package of mail about once a week. We just need to know where we will be ahead of time so that she will know where to send it. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem finding a post office to send it and I could call ahead and check that it was okay. We found out last summer that you can send mail to any post office by sending it General Delivery to that post office. I had heard that it wasn’t as simple as it used to be though because of the terrorist attacks and they were a little stricter about their rules so I wanted to call ahead and make sure they knew our mail was coming. I checked on my Microsoft Streets and Trips program and it shows the addresses and phone numbers of the post offices in each town. I was surprised that the little towns of Eureka and Austin didn’t have post offices and thought that maybe there was a mistake in my program so we told Steffy to send our mail to Fallon, which is about 300 miles west of the Nevada border. I tried to call them but the phone number that was listed in my Streets and Trips was a wrong number so we were a little concerned. The lady at the Baker post office said that there should not be a problem with getting our mail as we travel. The main thing she said was that the return address has to be on each piece of mail and you have to actually use the person’s legal name on the address now. She said if we use the smaller posts office there would be less problems also. She said there was a mistake in my Streets and Trips and that Eureka and Austin did have a post office. She gave me the 800 number for all of the post offices and said they would be able to tell me the number and location of any post office in the U.S. I was so tickled to get this. She was really nice.
Baker is such a poor sad little town. It is so beat up looking. The park ranger that we talked to the other day told us that everyone in this area owns their own business, works on the Baker Ranch or works for the Park Service. I wonder what the kids who live there turn out like. They have a tiny school so there must be kids there but we haven’t ever seen any. Salt Lake City is about 200 miles away and Reno is over 300 miles away so I don’t suppose they see much of big city life. What a shocker when they get out in the real world.
We drove up to the visitor center again and checked on the weather. The winds were supposed to blow from the south at 40 to 50 miles per hour throughout the afternoon and night. They were doing at least that. We could see the wind blowing the snow off Wheeler Peak. It looked like a blizzard up there. It was an amazing sight.
We talked to the ranger at the center a bit and got some information on the birds, plants and wildlife in the area. There are over 10 species of snakes that are seen here. I am glad that it is still too cold for them to be out! We found out that a bird that we had seen several times was a golden eagle. We thought it was a hawk of some kind but after seeing a picture of one we knew for sure. A really beautiful bird.
We drove back home and hunkered down in the trailer and tried to ignore the bucking and swaying that the trailer was doing because of the winds. I read and Glen looked at the material that we had gotten from the visitor center. After dinner we played Hand and Foot and I beat the pants off Glen AGAIN! I am glad that he doesn’t mind losing because if he did I would be without anyone to play cards with.
We went to bed and listened to the wind all night long. What an awful night. I would just about fall asleep and a gust of wind would hit and the trailer would sway and bounce like crazy. I didn’t really think we were in any danger of falling over but in the dead of night things seem worse than they really are. I was so glad to see the light of a new day and hear the blessed quiet of a windless morning.
April 26 – Saturday
We enjoyed the day so much after yesterday. Glen grilled steaks for lunch and we actually ate outside for the first time. It was finally warm enough and no wind! We did some bird watching and pretty much just sat around and vegged. We were feeling pretty groggy after the sleepless night. Glen didn’t even want to play cards!
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