(Posted 251002) Outside Fallon we got a chance to channel our inner Indiana Jones and visit an actual archeological dig site.
Despite the fact that the Walmart in Fallon was relatively quiet and peaceful over night, Tom didn't sleep particularly well and was up before 7 am. We had pretty much decided before going to bed to scrap our plans to visit Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park - the campground at which would've been our next scheduled dump+fill point tonight - so we took advantage of the early rise time and headed over Maveriks to use their free dump station after breakfast.
From there, we headed across town to the Churchill County Museum - having to manually detour around the section of Main Street that Waze didn't know would be closed for a Farmer's Market on a Saturday morning - to meet our group for a guided tour of Hidden Cave. We arrived about 20 minutes ahead of the 9:15 gathering time, so explored some of the exhibits that were available around the outside of the museum while we waited.
At 9:15 our tour guide, Melany, let us all in to the Museum and told us that we could browse the displays until the orientation movie started at 9:30. The museum is much larger on the inside than the visible storefront outside would lead you to believe, and we were only able to see a small portion of it in the 15 minutes available.
The 20 minute orientation film told the history - as we know it - of Hidden Cave. Hidden Cave was likely carved by the wave action of ancient Lake Lahontan, back when it covered most of Nevada. The cave was exposed when the waters receded, and was used by indigenous people as a "cache cave" - a place to store items for later retrieval - 3500-3800 years ago. Eventually, natural deposits of water and wind blown debris gradually built up on the cave floor sealing off the entrance and making it inaccessible. It was rediscovered in the 1920's and explored by three different teams of archeologists in the 40's, 50's, and '79-80 - with many artifacts from the last excavation left in situ (in place) so that future visitors could see them as they had been found.
After the film, we all returned to our cars and caravanned out (using the back roads, with the T42 bringing up the rear in the chain of 7 vehicles) to the Grimes Point Archeological area about 10 miles away. There are two parking areas at Grimes Point: one near the entrance to see the petroglyphs, and another about a mile further in on a dirt road for the trailhead to Hidden Cave; the caravan proceeded directly to the rear one. As we all arrived, we had a few minutes to get our things together and meet at the trailhead signs which had some useful information (useful more so, perhaps, for folks who ventured out there on their own instead of with the guided tour).
Our guide told us that our tour would take us counter-clockwise up the trail through stops 1-8, with Stop 8 being Hidden Cave itself where we'd be able to go inside. After that, we were free to explore the remainder of the trails on our own. And with that, we were off!
At one of the stops, we saw some prime examples of Great Basin petroglyphs.
Picnic Cave was another stop along the trail. Unlike Hidden Cave, Picnic Cave
is believed to have been occupied by prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and wasn't just used as a storage location. Particularly interesting is how the ceilings of the cave are encrusted with tufa.
Far off the sides of the trail we could see other caves as well, but the BLM didn't see fit to make them accessible for one reason or another.
The sign at stop 7 described how the entire valley floor seen from this location was covered by Lake Lahontan 10,000 years ago. Hidden Cave, which you may recall is believed to have been carved by the waves of Lake Lahontan, is even higher up the hill than where this photo was taken from.
Finally it was time for the "main event" - Hidden Cave itself. This unofficial-looking sign at the junction in the path that leads up to Hidden Cave warns folks not to bother trying to visit it on their own.
As we approached the now-opened gate, we could start detecting a very distinctive odor emanating from the cave. The archeologist in the orientation video had described it as "the smell of science" - but our guide told us that it's actually ammonia - from the years and years of bat guano that had soaked into the soil before the cave was re-discovered (the bats themselves have long-since been evicted). We had also been warned that once inside the cave, the ceilings in almost all the areas were safe for anyone 5' 10" and under, but the entrance was significantly shorter and we'd have to duck-walk the first 10 feet or so until we reached her assistant stationed inside at the point it was safe to stand up. Here's a photo of Christine coming back out of the gate at the end, to give you and idea of the entrance height.
We were one of the first ones brave enough to enter the cave (the combination of smell and duck-walk seemed to make folks eager to not be the first ones in) so got some nice photos of the interior. The boardwalks are arranged in roughly a square pattern across two levels, with most of the labeled items on the lower level.
The round tags stuck in the wall were just numbered soil markers, with numeric codes which only made sense if you had the book to look them up in. The rectangular tags labeled locations where specific artifacts were found, and so were much more interesting - as were the partially excavated spears sticking out from a few of the walls.
The white band seen here is a layer of ash from the eruption of Mt. Mazama - better known to most of us as "the volcano that became Crater Lake (in Oregon)".
Here's a view of the valley from right outside of Hidden Cave (you can see the T42 parked in the lot down below, if you look carefully 😉).
After the group disbanded at the end of the Hidden Cave tour, we finished exploring the rest of the trails on our own. Burnt Cave was the most interesting of the remaining stops, because it had red pictographs (pictures painted onto the rock, instead of carved into it like a petroglyph) inside - which, granted, were faded and hard to make out.
There were also some (natural) holes in the back wall, that made the rock resemble some sort of face.
When we were done, we drove back to the outer parking lot and walked the 0.2 mile long Petroglyph Trail.
As you can see, most of the petroglyphs lend themselves to interpretation/imagination. We titled this next one "The Lake Lahontan Sea Monster (Larval Form)":
And this one "The Lake Lahontan Sea Monster (Adult Form)":
After a quick lunch (and short nap for Tom - it's nice to be carrying your bedroom with you!) in the T42, we began our days' long journey down "The Loneliest Road in America" - as decreed by a
Life Magazine article in 1986 that went on to say encouraging things like "There are no points of interest...We warn all motorists not to drive there...unless they're confident in their survival skills". But instead of taking the diss lying down, the Nevada tourist folks turned the moniker into the motto behind a decades long ad campaign whose current incarnation includes these nifty little survival guide / passport things that you can send away for or pick up along the way, that has descriptions of - and room for stamps from - sights that you can see along the way. (Highway 50 also happens to follow the old Pony Express route in this area.)
About 17 miles down the road, we stopped at Sand Mountain to take a few photos. At 600 feet high, 3.5 miles long, and 1 mile wide Sand Mountain is the single largest sand dune in the Great Basin, and is currently managed by the BLM for OHV use. We didn't want to get too close, however, because the folks on iOverlander had warned of some pretty severe drainage ditches that run across the access road that RV'ers needed to be wary of (see the "DIP" sign) and we decided it wasn't worth the risk; you can get a better feel for the size of the dune in the zoomed photo by looking at the dwarfed RVs parked at the base of the dune, though.
Then it was another 22 miles . . .
. . . to our destination for the night: Middlegate Station.
Middlegate Station is a historic way station out in the middle of nowhere. It started as a stagecoach station, and was also a Pony Express changing station for 18 months. Today the site has a roadhouse bar/restaurant (what the travelnevada.com site eloquently refers to as a "Sagebrush Saloon"), a few somewhat seedy looking motel rooms, a small campground area, a gas station with 1970's-era looking pumps (but 2025 "we know you're in the middle of nowhere" pricing 😉), and most importantly: plenty of room for free RV parking overnight.
It was too early to actually eat dinner, but we went inside to make sure we were parked in an okay spot, check out the décor (which we had read was quite the thing to see - particularly the dollar bill covered ceilings which the
travelnevada.com site describes by saying "
The entire ceiling of the legendary Middlegate Station is covered in dollar bills, which harkens back to the mining days. The lore? Prospectors would pin a dollar to the ceiling before venturing out. That way, if they failed, no one could say they “don’t have a dollar to their name!” The tradition carries on today."), and see what the menu options were for dinner.
Hiding amongst the other kitschy antiques decorating the back dining room was a little vintage tin that caught Tom's eye. The graphics on the sides were extremely familiar to him (particularly the faces of "Ma and Pa" riding up front), and he's fairly sure that he spent a great deal of time playing with one just like it back in the early 70's. He checked with his sisters, though, and none of them remember having seen anything like it before.
The menu provided quite a bit of "food for thought" for the next couple of hours - as it started Tom contemplating whether or not he should attempt the Middlegate Monster Burger Challenge! It also had quite a bit of information about Middlegate itself.
Leaving out the side entrance of the restaurant, we ran into the resident cats. The gray one was was curious, but skittish - both wanting to come check us out, but not wanting to let us get
too close.
We returned to the T42 to bide our time until dinner. Tom did more research on the Monster Burger and found that it is a "
triple-decker beast comes with 1 ⅓ pounds of Angus beef on a sourdough bun, piled high with lettuce, tomatoes, red onions, pickles, cheese, peppers, and olives, and a gargantuan heap of fries". A photo from a Google reviewer also showed it to be endearingly cute.
We returned to the restaurant at 5 pm for an early dinner. Tom asked the waiter how many people who attempt the challenge are actually able to complete it, and he replied that many of the folks who try it are soldiers from the near-by military base and most of them fail. Tom chickened out in the end, and went with the original burger instead; Christine got the Veggie Burger. Both were good - and the fries were
extremely tasty for some reason (maybe we were too used to eating air fryer fries, and have just been deprived of genuine deep fried goodness for too long?).
By the time we were done with dinner, the sun was beginning to set and a cooler breeze was blowing through - a nice contrast to the overly-warm day. We opened the slider and rear doors of the T42, lowered the screens, and enjoyed the cooling cross-ventilation for a few hours.
As darkness fell, we realized we were in a Dark Sky situation and should probably take the opportunity to attempt some star photos.
We also realized that with a cattle ranch across the street and Middlegate behind us - and then nothing but desert for miles in any direction - we also were probably in a high "desert rodent risk" zone, and we didn't what a repeat of what happened in Copper Breaks State Park last February (oh yea, we're behind on our blog posts so
you probably don't know what happened yet: suffice it to say we had a furry visitor in our pantry at 4:30 am). Part of last summer's refit activities had included doing some mouse exclusion work around the gas tank area that had been suggested on the TOWB Facebook group, and one of the last mods before leaving on this trip was the addition of some mouse deterrent lights underneath the coach - which we fired up for the first time "for real" before going to bed around 9:30.
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