Anne-Marie and our Brother-in Law Ernie had discussed a shortcut that takes 20 miles or more off of this route, and it sounded like we would look for it again on this trip. Anne-Marie and I looked for the route before, and just gave up and continued on the main highway, but this trip we looked for the valley that should hold the shortcut, and we found it.
Anne-Marie and I both remember the word Churchill being involved in the route, or something that made us think of Churchill. As we traveled east on the Highway, at about 15 miles out of town, off to the right about 3 miles distance, was a valley heading off in the likely direction of the shortcut. A quick look at the GPS in the van, and the name of the road just coming up was Road 2B, Fort Churchill Road. A quick turn and we were started on our shortcut, and a fairly new paved road to boot. The paved road was an access road for a adjoining housing development, and I looked at the GPS, and it indicated that we were on a lessor not paved road, but it isn’t always accurate in these matters. A few hundred yards after the houses, the pavement stopped just before the cattle guard at a fence crossing the road. The cattle guard alone in this area of the country isn’t alarming as they are even on state highways, at times, but this was a bit different. The nice paved road narrowed down to a near single lane gravel road that was bordered on each side by old barbed wire fencing, with the occasional “No Trespassing” signs. The road looked to be very passable, and the gravel road was level looking, but unseen from a distance was that it was a bit wash boarded. As we drove on the dusty road, the wash boarding became worse and then bad, in places the road looked to be a cross between a riffle and a rapid in a river, in a few places the waves in the road were almost 24 inches from peak to peak, and what looked to be 10 inches deep. I found myself trying to dodge the high spots, almost climbing up out of the road grade that had been eroded down below the level of the field. We had slowed to a crawl, and after some encouragement from Anne-Marie to look for a place to turn around, I continued about a half mile ahead to a farm house. Not a good place to try to turn the trailer around, the wide areas had been used by farm equipment, and none were made for a low clearance trailer like ours. I checked the GPS, and followed the road on out, and a branch road headed back to the paved highway, just a few more miles up the road, or we could continue on for 13 more miles of gravel road, and come out at Fort Churchill State Historic Park. We were moving at a crawl, almost getting up to 11 mph at times. We reached the branch road, and it went up a hillside, not too steep, but not better, so we continued on the gravel road.
The gravel road followed the Carson River Valley, and the cottonwood trees were yellow and golden colored. This picture is at a wide area of the road, and the wash boarding was not too severe in this section.
Just inside the State Park, we came upon this sign, Pony Express Trail 1860-1861.
This is the road we just traveled, and it looks good in this view, but back behind us, the road hasn’t seen a road grader since this spring.
I looked at my mapping program on the computer Tuesday evening and found that the road has several names, Fort Churchill Road, Hwy 2B, and The California Emigrant Trail. I measured the shortcut and it is shown as 16 miles long vs. 26 miles to stay on the state highway, and it took us about an extra hour to travel.
We arrived in Tonopah for the evening, and Anne-Marie found that the silverware was rearranged in the drawer, there was tumbled things about in the spice cabinet, and the salt grinder had unscrewed itself and scattered its parts in the cabinet.
Tonopah is a old mining community, and the skyline still has the old mine structures. The lobby of the Tonopah Station Hotel, Casino, RV Park.
Tonopah seems to have lost its antenna TV stations, there is a cable TV company, but the RV Park doesn’t subscribe to it. Last year we had TV service with the antenna, but not a channel this visit. With no TV and slow internet, we were in bed at 8:00PM.
Yesterday was a travel day, again. We drove through Pahrump, and skirted the southern edge of Las Vegas on our trip south, and ended our travel day here at Laughlin Nevada. Anne-Marie counted 15 burros during the drive. Tomorrow will be a travel day, and we hope to arrive in Tucson on Saturday.
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