7-26-2020 Fernley, NV

Nobody knows why this town got the name, “Fernley.”  In fact, it all began in 1902 when a few farmers got together and thought this would be a good place to grow some crops because of an irrigation project on the Truckee River.  So they were all happily growing their beans and corn and then the railroad showed up.  By this time, the community had decided to call itself, “Fernley,” and the railroad decided it was a good place for a siding.  In 1908, they got a Post Office and by 1910, Fernley had 159 belly buttons.  The rest is history.  Now, there are about 20,000 Fernleyans.  This is the Reader’s Digest version.  (And yes, they have a Walmart.)

What's left of Fort Churchill

Hospital at Fort Churchill

Officers' quarters

A bit south of Fernley, Fort Churchill was established in 1860, with the usual goal of protecting settlers and travelers against Indian aggression.  Capt. Joseph Stewart was in charge of building the fort and being no dummy  he named it for his boss, Sylvester Churchill, Inspector General of the Army.  Their job also included protecting the overland routes of the Pony Express.

The Fort was intended to be a permanent installation and was built on stone foundations and structures made of adobe.  It was ¼ mile square, buildings all around the sides with a big center courtyard.  The buildings included barracks, six officers’ quarters and a hospital.  Plans change.  In 1869, the military had decided the job was finished and the fort was abandoned.  Enter Samuel Buckland, who bought the whole shootin’ match for $750 US. 

"We're going out there and then
up and over those mountains, right?
Ummm.... why?!"

Buckland Station

Sam Buckland was an entrepreneur, farmer and rancher.  He supplied the military, the emigrants and the local community with food, supplies and horses.  He established Buckland Station, a Pony Express stop where the riders were supplied with fresh mounts to continue their ride.  Sam, the new owner of the abandoned fort, stripped it of structural materials and used some of them to build Buckland Station where he and his wife, Eliza, lived.  Sam, Eliza and 5 of their 8 children (ages 8, 2, 1, 2 days and “infant no dates”) are buried at Fort Churchill and are the only remaining graves.  The 44 servicemen’s graves have been moved to a military cemetery in Carson City.

Pony Bob

The Buckland family gravesites

One of the more famous Pony Express riders was Robert Haslam.  He regularly rode the route between Tahoe and Buckland Station.  His famous record ride was 120 miles in 8 hours and 20 minutes while wounded.  The message he was carrying?  Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address.  His nickname was “Pony Bob,” what else?

Virginia City is a day trip from Fernley and it begged.  We just had to drive by our 10-acre “dream lot” to see what the new owners had made of it, for one thing.  We wanted to try to find my friend and boss’s grave (Ed G.) at the local cemetery and leave a few flowers.  It seemed it would be easy in the small cemetery but after an hour of searching in the hot sun, we gave up and laid the flowers on the grave of a Marine who had served in WWII.  Another goal was a cold Bucket of Blood Amber Ale and a bit of country music at the Bucket of Blood Saloon on the old boardwalk in the city.  This was accomplished. 

While you're standing there, Rob,
order me a Bucket of Blood Amber Ale!

Julia Bulette

When it came time to head for home, another storm was brewing and that seemed like a good signal not do that.  Instead, we waited for the storm to pass with a quick sandwich and fries at Virginia City Joe’s on the deck overlooking the hills beyond the city.  Joe’s used to be the Julia C. Bulette Saloon, Café and Red Light Museum.  The hookers’ museum used to be in the downstairs rooms.  Gotta think… what kind of artifacts would one find in a hookers’ museum?  It’s a curious place.  “What do you think this device did, Rob?”  Julia Bulette was the most well-known and loved of all the hookers in town.  She was a madam, hooker, philanthropist and a volunteer firefighter aside from her “day job,” as it were.  In 1867, at the age of 35, she was brutally bludgeoned and strangled to death.  Firefighters provided a mahogany coffin with silver handles and her funeral brought the entire town together.  When it came time to bury her, though, the Catholics resisted burying a lady of this “profession” on sacred Catholic ground.  So her last “getting laid” was getting laid to rest… well… you know….  somewhere out there in the hills, not many know where.  By the way, John Millian made the mistake of bragging about killing Julia for her jewelry and other valuables.  It didn’t take long to convict him and 4,000 people (including Mark Twain) witnessed his hanging.  Message:  Never, never, ever murder a town’s favorite hooker!

Julia's grave is out there somewhere.

Not to worry!  The Camera From Hell
may have found it!  I mean, how many graves
are out there, right?!

7-23-2020 Winnemucca, NV

There are beetles here.  Thousands and millions of big, black beetles.  They are enormous, the size of frogs.  The only one I have seen that is larger is Paul McCartney.  The really big ones are wearing masks.  They don’t eat much and they’re probably supposed to be a good thing but truth be told, I can live without bugs.  Any bugs.  And certainly without bugs that are the size of a Pontiac.

Chief Winnemucca

Sarah Winnemucca

Winnemucca began as a small village back in the late 1800s.  In fact, even the name has a history.  When he was little, the chief of the Paiute Indians encountered a bunch of white pioneer travelers and he was wearing only one shoe, actually a moccasin.  They nicknamed him, “wan-na-muc-cha,” which was a bit of a bastardization of English and Paiute for, “one moccasin.”  He liked his nickname so much that he started going by it exclusively.  It eventually morphed into the word, “Winnemucca.”  His daughter, Sarah, became a very significant figure in this area.  She was well-read and smart.  She traveled long distances between pueblos to communicate and teach her people.  You can still see some of the trails she walked between the villages.  She worked with the feds to aid her struggling people and in DC, she met with folks such as President Rutherford B Hayes in 1880.  Sarah Winnemucca was the first American Indian woman to write a book, her autobiography, in 1883, “Life Among the Piutes.”  Sarah’s statue is in Statuary Hall in the DC Capitol.  So far, anyway.

Mining, agriculture and ranching played a major part in the formation of this community.  When the Central Pacific Railroad came through the area in 1868 on its way east, the railroad and the Humboldt River locked Winnemucca in as a significant crossroad of commerce.  As far as ranching goes, the Basque sheepherders seemed to like it here and now, the percentage of Basque folks is the largest, 4.2%, in the nation.  Here’s a little detail I learned about the Basque.  They came from a small strip in the Pyrenees between France and Spain and had their own culture and their own language, it’s true.  But more than that, their heritage goes deeper than culture and language.  Blood-wise, the Basque people make up 25% of the RH-negative and 55% of the Type O people in all of Europe.  I don’t know how this fits into all of humanity but it helps me to get all the lamb dishes I want at their restaurants.

Front of the Martin Hotel, est. 1898

Upstairs at the Martin Hotel
standing by room # 16

One very well-known restaurant here in Winnemucca is the Martin Hotel and Restaurant where we were provided with a wonderful Basque dinner.  They seated us at a long table where others could possibly join us.  Our dinner began with mushroom soup and their signature fresh made bread.  Then, salad, a bean dish and a bowl of chunks of chicken simmered in a spicy tomato sauce.  This was followed by French fries, corn on the cob, garlic mashed potatoes and lamb shank that was slow-cooked for hours until the meat fell off the bone.  A dessert of bread pudding was next.  All of this and a carafe of wine were inclusive.  The waitress just kept bringing plates of food!  As for the Martin’s history:  Although it is said to have been established in 1898, some history and a lithograph suggest that it was a house of “soiled doves” as early as 1881.  The grand opening of the hotel took place on Christmas Day, 1915.  In 1919, a fire destroyed a big part of the building and the Martins gave up and moved to San Francisco.  The hotel was restored by the new owner, Charles Weikel, by 1920 and he added on 25 rooms.  The restaurant and rooming house were always a favorite place for the ranchers and sheepherders as well as new Basque immigrants to hang their hats.  The hotel is no longer available for occupancy but the kind waitress allowed us to go to the upper floor to snoop around.  The restaurant is still considered the best place in Nevada to experience an authentic family-style Basque dinner.

Reinhart House built in 1909 while the
Reinharts vacationed in Europe.
Considered one of the most upscale houses
in town.

Rogers House 1901
They say this house was built with
"square nails."  Never heard of it!

Many other old buildings still stand intact in Winnemucca and date back as far as the mid-1800s.  With help from a map and descriptions of these old structures we were able to spend a few pleasant hours drifting around the town and absorbing the town’s history and culture.

This is the oldest house we found, the
W C Record Home, built in 1874
and still mostly original.

7-19-2020 Wendover, NV Part II

Rules, rules, rules.  Maybe it’s my imagination but the people here seem pretty damned bossy.  After spending so much time in Idaho which seemed like sort of a free country, we resent these pushy assholes.  Upon arrival at our campground, they were so nasty about the mask thing that, with that and the swarms of black flies, we almost turned around and left.  Part of all of this may be due to the fact that Wendover is split in two between Utah and Nevada.  That means in this one area, they have 2 mayors, 2 city councils, 2 fire departments, 2 sheriffs, 2 highway patrols and 2 city cop shops.  So that explains it:  Way too many people who enjoy telling you what to do. 

"Wendover Will"

Wendover Will is 90 feet tall and is lit with a quarter mile of neon tube.  He was created in 1952 by Bill Smith to replace a tall light that he had built in the 1920s.  For years, Wendover Will stood at the State Line Cobblestone Service Station at the gateway to Wendover.  He was donated from Wendover, UT to West Wendover, NV in 2004 and is now a famous landmark standing at the center of a round-about at the entrance to town. 

That entrance, before the construction of US Route 40 (not the I-40), was on the Victory Highway, sections of which are now relics, constructed in the 1920s and which traversed the nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.  Here’s how it goes:  The Victory Highway got mostly paved over and replaced by US Route 40 which got replaced by the I-80.  The intention was to have a bronze eagle and a plaque at each county line where the Victory Highway crossed dedicating that stretch of highway to the county’s sons and daughters who served in WWI.  There are now only five of the original eagles known to exist, 2 in KS and 3 in CA.  The eagle here in West Wendover is a replica.  It is located on a small (~100 ft.) stretch of the original Victory Highway on which we were standing.

Rob really wanted to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats so we loaded up the cooler, hopped in the Jeepster and drove east of Wendover a few miles.  The flats are white salt.  And flat.  And white.  And salty.  And flat.  You can see Chicago from here.  This is a place where people build aerodynamically-streamlined vehicles and race them to see who can go the fastest.  It is tantamount, I think, to driving a fighter jet at full-throttle without ever rotating.  Only men know why this is a cool thing to do.  OK, so we saw that.

And we saw half a dozen scruffy looking animals, deer maybe, out on the back roads and 2 pronghorn antelopes grazing near Wendover Will.  They look like they sat in a bucket of white paint!

Deer named Scruffy and Scruffy Jr.

Antelope dining with Wendover Will

On to Winnemucca, hopefully a free country where we know that Basque Lives Matter!

7-18-2020 Wendover, NV Part I

If you drive around the country as often as we do, I guess you’re bound to encounter one of just about everything, eventually.  All Friday, the wind had been gusty, blowing us all over the road.  Late in the day maybe about 5PM, on Hwy 80 about 20 miles from Wendover just past the little berg of Oasis, we saw black smoke, then a debris field in flames.  A flatbed truck was hauling away a big burned chunk that looked like a wing.  Regretfully, I fear we had just come upon a plane crash and the situation looked grim.  We haven’t found any info on this.

Another note:  Pocatello has an interesting small “monument” with an Indian chief’s head in profile and the word “Chief” on it.  This was the sign that had been created for the movie theater that opened on January 5, 1938.   Mom would have gone to the movies there to neck when she was a teenager.  Admission was 49 cents.  I suspect that this sign will be torn down, now, in accordance with the latest trendy effort to homogenize the human race.  (By the way, rumor has it that New Zealand’s rugby team, the All Blacks, formed and named in the 1890s, is planning to change its name.  Ain’t that special?)

We spent most of our day at the Wendover Airfield.  We knew that there was a museum here but we found abandoned barracks and a few hangars, some weather-worn plaques and one forlorn DC4 firefighter.  Finally, we found the museum which, when the base was active, was actually the Officers’ Club.  Landon, the Curator threw open the doors and gave us a warm welcome.  We were full of questions; Landon was full of answers.

Atomic mission hangar - Note the cut-out
above the hangar doors.  They had to add
this to accommodate the tall tail
of the B29.

The bombsights were unloaded from the
airplanes after each run and stored in
these vaults for security reasons

Original control tower built in 1942

It is still an active airfield but its claim to fame is really its past.  It was the home of thousands of troops who trained for WWII.  At its peak, 18,000 military troops and 2,000 civilians lived on this base.  Construction began in 1939.  By 1941, groups and squadrons were stationed here and by the end of WWII, 20 groups of 4 squadrons each had been trained.  McArthur said that the gunners who came from Wendover were some of the best gunners in the Army. 

Inside the atomic mission hangar - Col.
Tibbet's office is above and behind this F86.

Bomb loading pit

Significantly, this base was the last training stop for the group that was to deliver the atomic bomb.  The hangar that could house two B29s is fully-restored and up in one corner is Col. Paul Tibbet’s office.  The Enola Gay and Bock’s Car were stationed here, their last stop before Tinian Island.  It is here at this base where bombing groups practiced loading the airplanes and making bombing runs.  Dummies of Fat Man and Little Boy were loaded but they were so heavy that the method of loading them onto the B29s consisted of lowering the dummy bombs into pits in the ground, rolling the airplanes over the pits and then lifting the bombs into their bays.  Little Boy weighed 9,000 lb. and Fat Man tipped the scales at 10,000.  A practice run loading, carrying and suddenly dropping this kind of weight was a fine art.  Other skills that were honed were the sighting in and firing of the on-board machine guns from the airplanes which were tethered to the ground.  Recoil, don’tchaknow.

Little Boy dummy bomb in the Officers'
Dance Hall

Original barracks

Living conditions in the Wendover area were harsh.  Oppressively hot summers and unbearably cold winters in the sparsely furnished barracks were a fact of life for these heroes.  Of the hundreds of buildings that were here at this base, only 90 remain:  some barracks, the nurses’ quarters and some of the hospital buildings, a few of the hangars and bath houses.  The severe quarters had no air conditioning, of course, and there were 3 stoves for the cold winter months. 

Typical barracks with porches

Restored barracks

Landon and Lindy on the
porch of a restored barracks

Vargas girls pin-ups in the barracks

Officers' Club cafeteria

Officers' Club - Now the museum

The devotees of the history of the events that occurred at Wendover Airfield do not wish to reconstruct but to restore and as generous donations are received, small projects make some progress.  What we thought would be a brief visit turned into an entire afternoon and Landon was a fine tour guide.  What a fantastic experience and another humbling lesson in gratitude to our brave war fighters.  If this memorial is an indicator, they are gone but they are far from forgotten.💖

7-16-2020 American Falls, Idaho

If you read the comments at the end of the last blog, you saw that our friend, Jim, met one of the Idaho Hermits, Buckskin Bill.  So of the 3 Hermits, two of them met up with my friends, what are the odds?

We tasted the cheese we bought in Salmon, “local sheep cheese.”  It is called Aged Carmen Carrano, “Our signature ‘Mandego-style’ Alpine Artisan Sheep Cheese with a perfectly balanced and distinctively rich buttery and nutty flavor.”  Ingredients:  Raw sheep milk, etc.  It was made at the Mountain Valley Farmstead in Carmen, ID.  The taste was very sharp and it’s kind of crumbly, a bit like extra sharp cheddar or parmesan.  A few slices with a cocktail are the perfect touch.  It's great crumbled on a salad.

Devil's Orchard

On 7-14, we stopped at Craters of the Moon National Monument, just a quick 100 miles down the road.  It is a massive lava field that was created by fissures and rifts in the earth’s surface that coughed up lava, not like you would imagine flowing down from the top of a volcano.  This stuff oozed out of cracks, dey ain’t no volcano!  The fields cover thousands of acres and looks like, well, the moon.  It all began 15,000 years ago but there has been activity as recently as 2,000 years ago, Jesus’ birthday.  Much of the rock and pulverized rock is iron pyrite (fool’s gold) and the land sparkles.  We hiked Devil’s Orchard, a field of nasty lava rock and cinders that is slowly beginning to show signs of vegetation.Next, we tackled the Inferno Cone.  It is a steep 300 foot rise to the top from where you can see miles and miles of lava fields and beyond.  We made it to the top!  The whole area is really pretty weird.

Oceans of lava rock in Devil's Orchard

Rob heading up Inferno Cone

We made it to the top!

This park, Willow Bay Resort, is situated on the edge of American Falls Reservoir.  The original dam was formed by a natural lava flow but in 1923 and again in 1978, humans engineered a dam that created this 56,000 acre reservoir on the Snake River which obliterated the original town of American Falls.

We’re pretty sure we got the best spot in the park on the end overlooking the water and next to a natural preserve where wildflowers grow and birds visit.  It is shady and sunny both, depending on the time of day.  In the evening, campfire.  In the morning, sunshine with a cup of coffee and Sudoku.  (12 minutes on this one.) 

Hi Roberto!

Today was kayaking day for Lindy.  I paddled out as far as I could, then along the banks where I heard that there is a moose couple living.  I didn’t see the meese (they might have gone to bed already) but there were big fish jumping (probably rainbow trout since salmon can’t get here from there), loons, ducks, great northern geese, white pelicans and cormorants.  The water was as smooth as glass in the small breeze and sunshine.  It’s always tranquilizing.  Gotta look into a kayak!

I'm out there... if you look closely!

Walter DeLaMare's place of business
for 50 years, Union Pacific RR

Today, in the afternoon, Rob wanted to explore a bit in Pocatello where his Grampa worked at the Union Pacific RR and where his Mom grew up.  The old offices of the Union Pacific, which are usually open to tourists, are closed for now, even with a mask.  Rob really wanted to see if he could find his Grampa’s old office among the artifacts but that was not to be.  

The Hotel Yellowstone across the street was built in 1915.  

This was originally the hotel receoption
area, now a bar and lounge

It was easy to envision Grampa walking there for lunch or stopping by at the beautiful old bar in the evening with his buddies.  There is an old elevator that deserves attention and ultimately, Mike envisions a uniformed and white-gloved elevator operator who will carry guests up to their floors.  One small room, constructed of rich dark wood and the original chandeliers, is furnished with overstuffed chairs where my imagination says that old rich guys sat and smoked cigars and discussed the state of world affairs, finance, banks and such while the women retired to the sitting room nearby to sip tea.  The building is in a transition phase now with struggling new imaginative owners and a challenging restoration enterprise.

Smoking lounge for old
guys with cigars and a snifter of brandy

The elevator:  restoration project 

Hotel Yellowstone in Pocatello, ID (built in 1915)

A small store called the Butcher Block had one slab of fresh Alaskan cod left.  That poor fellow is destined for tonight’s grill.  Life is good.