I love the desert backroads of central Nevada, especially those off US Highway 50 (“The Loneliest Road In America”). I’ve been driving them on and off for a couple of decades now, but I still can’t claim to know the area particularly well — there are a lot of these roads (most of them little more than dirt tracks), and only so much time…. And they’re not the sort of roads you want to have your car break down on, either. It’s not as remote as the Australian desert of my childhood, (i.e. you don’t need to be able to go hundreds of kilometres without a petrol station or source of fresh water, and be able to cope with a national main road that in reality is a deeply-rutted and washboarded two-lane dirt track), but it’s not exactly a drive through the Mojave on Interstate 40, either. You can go a morning without seeing another vehicle on the road. Plus there’s an awful lot of military on both sides of the roads and tracks; you do not want to get lost off-road here, or go down too many tracks you can’t see marked on the map as a public road.
This is one of the roads I haven’t done so far — White Pine County Road 1, heading north as it crosses Highway 50 somewhere east of Eureka, NV. When I took this photo, we were on our way along Highway 50 to Ely, NV after a long diversion to Spencer Hot Springs a few hours earlier (Spencer Hot Springs is worth its own writeup, but that’ll have to wait). I was trying to get to Ely before sundown because I really don’t like driving Highway 50 much after dark out here — too much wildlife, if nothing else (and all those crazies in pickups on a winding two-lane blacktop). And then the sunset opened up in streaks and fields of orange, red, and yellow, in all directions around us. But it wasn’t the sky that really attracted me at the time, it was the effect of that red, yellow, and orange on the ground and things around us — even the cars — as we drove along. The tinges, the subtle reflections, the infusions of washed-out color. I stopped at the first convenient safe place, which happened to be right here, where County Road 1 goes north and south across the county in all its dirt track glory. I gave up on the idea of getting to Ely before dark.
I got a bunch of predictably-boring photos of the sky — all texture and colorfields — but equally predictably, it was the handful of throwaway shots I did that combined the sky with the natural and human-made artifacts that really did it for me. And unlike the actual (live!) visual experience itself, the best shots were later in the process, when the light was much more subdued (live, of course, the brilliant colors and contrasts were overwhelming). I like the way the light is so subdued in this image that you can barely see the county road, and the way the metallic back of the stop sign just looks blankly back at us. And I remember how cold it started getting as the sun went down — I was still dressed more or less for the hot springs, and after walking a fair distance from the car, I regretted not wearing a suitable jacket (the next morning in Ely, my hair froze almost instantly as I went outside to pack the car after a quick shower — I don’t really have the sort of cold-weather common sense you need for this part of the world).