Thelma and Louise: Day 5: A Gravel Road and a Styrofoam Container

Or:
Margaret Thatcher Never Tap Danced in a Charcoal Oven.

At this point on Thursday evening we are well past self amusement. We are sitting in the most adorable bed and breakfast in the Great Basin National Park. The people are lovely and the log cabin is so cute. It feels like home, so much so that we have caught a little bit of the silly bug. Although to be fair, the Margaret Thatcher bit started much earlier.

We left Ely this morning and headed out towards Great Basin with our eyes on a stop at Ward. We bought supplies for the day at Ridley's (believe it or not!) grocery store. There was an overwhelming abundance of canned goods, and we left with more processed foods than I'm sure mom has seen in a year! We packed our cooler, and headed off!

We stopped first at Ward and saw their townsite and cemetery. Was this the actual first stop? Um, no. The first stop would have been when I hit the fan shortly after turning on to the dirt road. Our newly acquired styrofoam cooler was jumping all over the backseat. I opened our survival kit in hopes of finding duct tape and found a knife the size of a kindergartener (thank you BSHSW). I ended up securing it with our sweatshirts and was quite proud of myself. That lasted until we drove in to a small ravine (emphasis on small). So the rest of the trip, the cooler was seat buckled and creaking and groaning and squeaking with every movement of the vehicle.

Back to Ward: Unbelievably most of this town was moved across the valley to Taylor when the mine stopped producing. Moving an entire town 10 miles before 1900 seems so hard!

After the cemetery and townsite were the Charcoal Ovens. These were amazing! Built by the "carboneri" (Italian worker), these provided the charcoal to run the mine at Ward and other surrounding mines. So much timber was required to produce the charcoal needed to run the mines, that often the timber surrounding charcoal ovens was cleared in about a 35 miles radius. There was an intricate 12 day process that was taken to create the charcoal.

The ovens have been well kept, and were fun to walk around in. The acoustics were amazing, so I did a little tap dance in each one. Flap, flap, flap, flap, cramp roll, paddle and roll... It was gravel, and I had to dance around the cow pies. And I was wearing Chacos. And my hair looked like a bouffant. I'm not sure why the bouffant mattered so much, but it added to the experience!

From Ward we headed to Great Basin National Park. A big draw in this park is the Bristlecone Pine trees that are thousands of years old. We were hoping with the nice weather the road would be open, but it was still snowy. Next time! We did drive as far as possible and walk up the closed road quite a ways. These were the first actual trees we've seen (tree being something that is at least taller than our car!).

We were warned at the park about altitude sickness which has symptoms including: nausea, incoherent speech and headache. Wait, isn't that every day! Ha!