The 2025 Nevada Trip Begins! (Pyramid Lake) [250925-26]

We're finally on the road again - this time, on a three week sojourn to see the sights of Nevada.

(Editor's Note: well, we're in sort of pickle here, since life sort of got in the way and we obviously haven't managed to catch up with the sizeable backlog of posts about our 2024 East of the Rockies Trek (EotRT) yet.  Our dilemma is that we want to put new content up while its still relatively fresh/recent - but also want the overall blog to maintain a linear timeline.  The "best" middle-ground we could come up with is that we'll continue to use the Blogger dates (which control the sort order of the posts) to represent the dates that events actually happened, but the text of all new posts will begin with a "(Posted YYMMDD)" so you can tell when the content was finally posted.

Unfortunately, this means that if you want to read all the new posts about our adventures you'll have to flip between two parts of the blog list with new posts about "recent" adventures appearing near the top, and new posts about older EotRT adventures eventually appearing below this one in the list.  To make this a little less painful, we'll do a couple of things:

• A new What's the latest 2024 East of the Rockies Trek post? page has been added to the Pages widget (usually visible on the left hand bar if viewing full screen in a desktop browser, or through the "hamburger menu" list if viewing on a mobile browser) which will be updated to always list/link the most recent EotRT page to have been posted.
• Any new EotRT pages added will have "Next post" and "Previous post" links added to the bottom to help you navigate between pages, without having to find them in the list. 

Note that prior to the start of this trip, the last EotRT blog posted was Illinois, Part 4 - Hanging out at Abe and Mary's Old House [240703] - although readership numbers would seem to indicate that most folks didn't realize that we had started posting catch-up posts starting with a few posts prior to that one, so we back-populated "Next post" and "Previous post" links into a few of those to help you out there. 😉)

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It's hard to believe that it's been almost 6 months since we returned from our 11 month East of the Rockies Trek.  It was good to be home for a while, and have some time to visit with friends and family again, but the urge to get back on the road was always there.  In the interim, the T42 has been slowly going through a minor refit which included:

• A trip back to La Mesa RV to take care of two Winnebago recalls that came out while we were gone (one to keep the awning from accidentally deploying while driving - Winnebago's second attempt to resolve that particular issue, and another to fix some Volta cable routing), as well as to get our defective bike rack installation (and the resulting rear door damage) repaired.  While we officially got the "goodwill warranty authorization" for the repair on our visit back in May, it took over 4 months for the replacement door to be available from RAM - and we're now back on the schedule for installation in mid-November.  So we've been traveling rack/bike-less since May, since in the course of getting the warranty authorization they took apart the jury-rig fix we made in the Florida Keys last January in order to be able to complete the last few months of our Trek.
• Two trips to the RAM dealer to take care of two RAM recalls that came out in the past year (which included unnecessarily replacing our radio 🙄).
• Various repairs both big and small by Tom, for a number of things that broke or got damaged on the road and we fixed "well enough till we get home where we have proper tools".
• A few enhancements / upgrades were added - many of them with "free" Amazon Vine items.

Unfortunately, a family emergency the week before our trip cut into our planned prep time a bit and we didn't have time to complete all of the planned T42 mods before leaving for Nevada - but the "important" ones all got done.  The mod delays cascaded into packing delays as well, so we didn't end up leaving home until around 2:30 in the afternoon on Thursday.

Luckily our planned stopping place for the first night was either the Donner Pass Rest Area (outside Truckee), which should only take 3-4.5 hours from home, if it was decent - or another overnight lot another 15 minutes down the road.  We planned to leave mid-morning so that we could avoid both the morning and afternoon commute times around the Sacramento area and make it in 3 hours; but our actual leaving time landed us the afternoon commute.  Traffic slowed to a crawl between mid-Davis and the Yolo Causeway.

We stopped at the CAT Scales on the far side of the causeway (in West Sac) to weigh ourselves.  We were relieved to find that we are running well below the 9350 lb GVWR of the Promaster this time out, very unlike most of the EotRT where we were running uncomfortably close to either the 9350 GVWR and/or rear 5291 GAWR for most of the trip. We're fairly certain that a large contributing factor is that we are without both the bike rack (and it's main reinforcement plate) as well as the bikes themselves on this trip.

After some minor additional traffic congestion on the way out of Sac, the remainder of the drive was uneventful and we arrived at the Donner Pass Rest Area around 6:20 in the evening. The traffic noise was not overly bad there, and there were garbage cans as well as working water fountains and reasonably nice restrooms which would help us stretch our tank capacity a bit further, so we decided to stay there for the night.

Apparently, this little kitty decided that this rest area would be a good place to stay as well:

There's a fenced / gated area behind the rest area parking lot that is really pretty. The gates were all open (we're thinking that they probably close and lock them in the winter to prevent people from trying to use the area as a snow park, because there are signs posted everywhere that you are NOT allowed to park at the rest area to play in the snow!) so we went exploring for a little bit - not specifically to try to find the cat and claim the $1000 reward (we figure the chances of that are roughly the same as winning big at any of the Nevada casinos), but if we should happen upon a cat while exploring we certainly weren't going to just ignore it. 😜

Dinner that evening was some of our usual boondocking fare (precooked rice with "dressed up" tinned fish and tinned peas for Tom, and rice and Madras lentils for Christine). After some housekeeping items, we settled headed to bed around 10 pm.

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We slept reasonably well Thursday night, with things being a little noisier than desired not so much because of the freeway a short distance away but because of the big rigs idling their engines until the wee hours of the morning (a common problem when sleeping in Walmart parking lots as well, but at least there you can often move farther away from them); we slept considerably better after the the last of them finally turned their engines off around 3 am.

We spent some time researching various things during/after our morning routine, so we didn't get back on the road until 10 am and crossed the border into Nevada 27 minutes later.

Another 20 minutes east brought us into Reno, where we stopped at Costco for gas. The Costco gas station in Reno is extremely popular/busy, so it took quite some time to fuel up. We went into the warehouse afterwards to use the restroom - and since we were there anyway, to check for samples. 😉 We were delighted to find that the Reno Costco had a plethora of samples available - despite the fact that we were there at a time that would've been considered "a little to early too start sampling" at our home Costco.

After our sample run, we hopped back onto I-80 and continued to follow the path of the Truckee River east for another 30 miles.

When the Truckee River split from I-80 to turn northward, we did too - taking NV-447 northward about 12 miles onto the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation to reach our next destination: the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitors Center.

We spent about an hour (with a lunch break in between) browsing the various displays in the museum that talked about Pyramid Lake itself, and the history of the Paiute people that lived there. Pyramid Lake is the largest remnant of ancient Lake Lahontan, a colossal inland sea that once covered most of Nevada. The Paiute lived and thrived in the Pyramid Lake area for thousands of years - until settlers "discovered" the area (and its resources) in the 1800's and the Paiute were eventually forced onto a small reservation. The size of contemporary Pyramid Lake was greatly reduce in the early 1900's when the U.S. Reclamation Service built the Derby Dam on the Truckee River to divert water for irrigation; it's estimated that lake levels dropped by 80 feet in the next 60 years, and caused the extinction of at least one species of trout found only in Pyramid Lake.

One of Tom's favorite displays was this one, that describes the various ways the Paiute used Tule (reeds). Something about the thought of cruising around on a lightweight reed boat while carrying around reed duck decoys seems oddly appealing for some reason . . .

Afterwards we took a drive up NV-446, which runs up the west side of the lake to do some sightseeing, with the help of a map we got from the Visitor Center.  All of the side roads off the main one lead into areas that require Tribal Permits to access - and the Day Use permit fee ($25 on up) seemed exorbitantly high to us if all you wanted to do was just snap a couple of photos - so we stayed on the main road, using turn outs (or sometimes just stopping in middle of the road if there weren't any turnouts handy; the road is not heavily traveled) when there was something of note.  This resulted in some of the items being photographed being at a sub-optimal distance, but we can live with that. 🙂

As we approached the southern tip, we got our first good view of Pyramid Lake - as well as the eponymous pyramid shaped rock formation waaaaaay off in the distance on the far side of the lake.

The first point of interest on our map was Popcorn Rock - a uniquely shaped tufa formation.

The next significant POI was Indian Head Rock, which not only has an face looking off to the right - but if you look carefully there's also a bunny on the ground in front of it.

Proceeding onward, we continued to snap photos of interesting looking (but unnamed) tufa formations, as well as the pyramid rock from changing angles.

As we approached the point where the road was closed and we'd have to turn around and head back (less than halfway up the side of the lake) we came across a particularly large, well-paved turnout and got out to take some final selfies and videos.

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We turned around and headed 71 miles SE to the city of Fallon, where we'd be spending the night.  Before heading to the actual Walmart we'd be staying at, we visited the Maverick gas station a few blocks away to check out the free dump station (reported on iOverlander) "in case we needed it later" and found it to be everything we want in a dump station: clean, out of the way, and with a threaded rinse hose that we could use for tank flushing.

We arrived at our Walmart around 5:20 and did some grocery shopping, including picking up some of our Wallydocking favorites for dinner (frozen Meat Lover's Lasagna for Tom, frozen Four Cheese Lasagna for Christine, and a can of Mixed Vegetable Medley to share).  Oddly, during dinner we found that abc.com was willing to let us stream the evening's Jeopardy episode using our Xfinity credentials, when it won't let us do it when we're visiting the North Bay - not sure why being all the way in Nevada is "better" to them.

Tom spent the rest of the evening putting the finishing touches on the Indiana, Part 4 - Hiking in Turkey Run State Park [240705] EotRT blog, which was published at the end of the evening along with Indiana, Part 3 - Rain Day in Turkey Run State Park [240704].  Christine spent the evening re-working the next few days' plans, since the predicted incoming rain storm would could make our planned visit to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park - with its 2 mile dirt/gravel access road - needlessly unpleasant if the road were to turn muddy.

We headed to bed around 11 pm, officially earning us the Nevada sticker for our tracking map.

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Next post: (coming soon)