Back in the slow lane

8/13/2017

Regrettably, Jane and I’s time in Reno has come to an end. Hot August Nights drew to a close on Sunday morning with a strong whiff of hydrocarbons and a distant rumble of exhaust. As the day dawned, thousands of classic cars made a mass exodus from Reno, radiating out from the city in every direction towards an inconceivable number of destinations. These incredible remnants of past times faded back into the desert, eventually seeming to be nothing more than mirages, just wishful thinking in the mind of a suddenly lonely gearhead. It’s always sad seeing cars go. As all of that wonderful chrome and the flashy paint jobs and the rusty road warriors depart, I can’t help but think of the drivers. I’ve made so many friends, and it’s sad to think that I’ll have to wait another year – or more – to see them. Some of them I’ll never see again. But that’s life, I guess.

I strive to live my life to its fullest, to make each day – even the mundane days - vibrant and beautiful and full of adventure. It’s important to me to be able to share that with as many people as I can. By the very nature of my hobbies, many of my friends are people that I’ll only really see a few times in my lifetime. So I make it count when I do get to see them. The same applies for any new person I meet. Hot August Nights is one of those events where I really get to be the best that I can be, and I think that almost everyone attending likely feels the same way. After so much joy and enthusiasm shared among so many people, one can’t help but feel a little deflated afterwards. Fortunately, I have Jane to buoy me up. It’s hard to feel downtrodden when you’ve got thousands of miles left on an awesome road trip with a car like Jane.

The Reno fire department takes their 1929 firetruck home, complete with attached laddertruck. It is highly visible even from far away!

The laddertruck extension is so long that it needs a guy in back with a steering wheel so the whole thing can actually go around corners. How does the guy in back communicate with the guy up front? Mostly pointing and waving, apparently.

And so, after watching cars rumble out of town for a while, Jane and I headed south towards Mono Lake. More adventures awaited, and all we had to do was keep our noses pointed at the horizon.

Well, that, and fill up on gas. I had succeeded in not burning too much of it in the week of shenanigans, but still needed a stop at the gas station on the way out of town. And that’s when Jane started getting up to no good again.

Now, I was 100% expecting this. Historically speaking, Jane has always been on her best behavior when in the company of other classic cars, and has always been on her worst behavior directly following their departure. I’ve gotten all kinds of interesting things, from heater hoses leaking onto passengers’ feet to a suddenly slipping clutch disc. Last year when leaving Reno, I stopped at the gas station and then got to spend 10 minutes trying to fire her back up for reasons that still remain a mystery. This year, Jane decided that a reprisal of the starter’s Mt. Rainier performance was in order.

So I sat there at the gas station, growling back at the starter as it howled at me and made all kinds of terrible noises. Eventually I got out, put her in gear, and spent a bit rocking her back and forth until she rolled forward enough to turn the engine over a bit – and then she cranked right up, and off we went. Hmmmmm.

As I left town, dust rising in a cloud to obscure the way back, I thought about that a bit. Back at Mt. Rainier, Don had told me that the flywheel was really not in great shape, and that probably I should think about replacing it as the new starter would really only be a band-aid fix. And here I was, driving away after spending a full week fooling around with thousands of people who had the knowledge and ability to help me swap the parts out. Driving away from the one town that would be guaranteed to have all of the necessary parts to fix the problem.  Driving away from safety and out into the wilderness. It was at this point that I began to realize that maybe I’m not the brightest crayon in the box.

I am, however, possibly the bravest crayon. Or at least the stupidest.

So I kept motoring on, stopping once more for gas before hitting Mono Lake (and yes, I had to push start my own car at that gas station too). 

At Mono Lake, I met back up with my Dad and we explored the area together while I steadfastly ignored the starter issue. Mono Lake is a really peculiar lake – it’s saline (salty)! Several freshwater streams flow into it, and nothing flows out. So how is it that it’s saline? Well, dissolved salts are naturally present at low concentrations in the runoff and streams feeding this lake. Evaporation removes water from the lake, but there is nowhere for the salt to go (because there is no stream outlet), so the lake’s salinity increases. Pretty neat stuff!

This odd lake is host to a couple of very specialized animals: brine shrimp and alkali flies. The brine shrimp here number in the trillions and are an important food source for migratory birds. There are so many shrimp that scooping up a small handful of water at the edge of the lake will net you at least 5. It’s fascinating and kind of disgusting at the same time. Even more disgusting (and also still fascinating) are the alkali flies, which hang out on the shoreline and encase themselves in air bubbles to graze underwater. They don’t bite or bother humans at all, being more interested in what’s below the lake surface, but it is pretty gross seeing millions of them collected along the water’s edge. Here’s a picture, so you can go “Eww” too:

 

Eww.

But wait, there’s more! I haven’t even gotten to Mono Lake’s most famous and peculiar features yet! But I’m getting to them now. Mono Lake is best known for its tufas, which are knobby limestone towers that jut up into the water column, rising up out of the water in shallow areas where lake level has dropped through time.

These tufas are created by calcium-rich underwater springs that expel out into the lake from the lakebed. As the calcium-rich waters contact the saline carbonate-rich lake waters, calcium carbonate (limestone) precipitates out. Over time, towers of limestone build where the springs flow. Think of it as a kind of upside-down underwater stalactite! Super cool.

Dad and I wandered around these for a while, but the average person can only look at limestone for so long (I’m a geologist specializing in carbonates (limestone), so I can look at these all day… but hey, I recognize that most people are not as silly as me). So we headed south into Lee Vining for one last dinner together before parting ways. We chose the Tioga Gas Mart, home of Whoa Nellie Deli, a critically acclaimed restaurant that for some reason resides in a small town inside a gas station. No complaints here, though – the food was EXCELLENT. I had the meatloaf.

And so concluded my last day in human company for a while. Jane remains grumpy, and I remain ostrich-like in my desire to bury my head in the sand and ignore the grumpiness. Tomorrow, I’ll head west through Yosemite National Park and my dad will head south to the eastern Sierra Nevadas for some solo traveling and photography of his own. Until then… Kelly signing out.