(On our last blog post, we left off at my plan-B, camping at Poverty Flats, near Overton, Nevada…)

Morning… around 5:30am

Ahhh, finally had a good night sleep. It was quiet and there was a nice cool breeze. But damn, I was up early! Again, up before the dawn. Grabbed a coffee and my camera and went out to shoot the sunrise, or what light there was on the distant mountains. Good or bad, I made the most of it. It was such a unique area. Yeah, there are more “epic” areas (like the state park), but they were full of people, and noisy. I really prefer these lesser-known areas, quiet, unique. Areas that if they were anywhere else, WOULD be epic in their own rights.

Valley at the Poverty Flats camping area.

I walked around the ridgeline like I did last night. As is happening everywhere, lots of trash strewn about. Someone actually threw a mattress down the hill! Why do that? There’s got to be a dump in Overton. I just shook my head…

Anyway, I wanted to get a move on early so I could get a campsite at Valley of Fire. I headed out before 7am, before anyone else was stirring about. I headed into Overton to make sure I had plenty of drinking water before setting up. My new friend KP from last night told me to stop at the Dollar Store, so that was my first stop. They weren’t open yet, of course. But… there were these cool water machines just outside their door. Only 40 cents a gallon, imagine that! So I grabbed the big 5 gallon container I bought from Walmart when I first arrived and filled it to the top. Then I thought, why not fill up my now-empty gallon jugs too? I was so amazed at this machine (I’m so easily amused lol) I took a video of the water fill. I didn’t realize these machines were all over the place. I guess I never bothered to pay attention. Thought all those machines outside of grocery stores were video movie rentals or something. Haahaa

Now that I had PLENTY of water, I headed back to the Valley of Fire to look for a campsite. I was tickled to be on the road so early, I just KNEW I was going to get lucky. But then… I noticed a warning light on my dashboard. Looked like a tire with an exclamation point. I wasn’t familiar with it, but it was yellow so I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d check the renters guide when I found my campsite. Probably just some tire traction issue from driving on gravel, maybe, or heaven forbid, a tire is low on air. I’d give it the rest of the day and see what happened. Maybe after a couple of starts and stops, it’ll turn itself off.

As I pulled into the campground, mindful to avoid that big pothole on the road, I found a campsite! YAY! Site # 2, right as I drove in. I spotted it right off and grabbed it. Hindsight tells me I should have circled and looked for a better site, but I was happy to be in an established site with a bathroom, and better yet, showers! (Yeah, I hadn’t showered since Miami Saturday morning! (let me clarify, I did “clean”, and used my dry shampoo, but that can only take you so far…) So I pulled into the site, got level, and went and filled out the self-pay envelope and dropped $40 in it for the 2 nights. Seeing the utility-like post on the side of the site, I assumed I had hookups. ‘Assumed’ was the apropos word here.

So now I had drinking water and a campsite, I was happy as a lark and wanted to go out and explore! Off to the Visitor center I went. I wanted to pay for the next 2 days. I didn’t realize I could have paid right there in my campground envelope. The park ranger was less than helpful. I asked for change for my last $20 bill and a trail map. She gave me a $10 bill and 2 $5s, pulled out a piece of paper (trail map) and handed it to me and walked away. What a wonderful welcome!

I paid her no never mind and went on up the Mouse’s Tank Road, the road which heads north to all the trail heads. It was about 9am now, and the light was pretty harsh with blue-bird skies, but I was going to see and photograph as much as I could. Tire warning light was still illuminated. Hmmm, I was beginning to get concerned. But, I went on. Saw lots of people pulled over at many of the popular trailhead parking lots. I kept driving. Seemed the really beautiful stuff was where you weren’t allowed to park. Then I came across this parking area #2. No cars. I pulled over. Jumped out for a few quick shots, but kept walking further and further in. There were so many cool little vignettes. Eventually, I was near some rock formation, and I had to explore more. Dare I say I ‘scrambled’? I didn’t really crawl, but I went up a rather steep piece of slickrock to get a better view. Wasn’t really that high, but enough to fool me. Haahaa I came back down and found some mini arches in the rock. I just pointed my camera and shot everything. It was then that I realized I left the RV unlocked (I think the keys were still in the ignition too). I had only meant to wander a few feet away, not go trekking through the desert. I felt I saw what I wanted to see. Definitely made a note to come back here that night for sunset, or early the next morning for sunrise. How beautiful it must be in the golden hour light. I was excited.

After that I wandered further up Mouse’s Tank Road. This place was truly amazing. Like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Definitely prehistoric. How the earth’s processes molded itself to make these rock formations I’ll never know. I then came to the end of the road, the White dome trail area. It was FULL. I think I got the last parking spot because someone else had just pulled out. (One good thing about this RV, it was small enough to fit in normal parking spots, no waiting for extra long or wide parking. Helped immensely!) It would be a quick stop and then out. So many cool rock formations. I grabbed my long lens to pull some details out of the further away rocks, but it kept giving me issues. I had to keep taking it off and putting it back on. It would overexpose, then underexpose. I couldn’t understand what I was doing to make it behave like that. Oh well. I did my best with it then put the shorter zoom back on. Then this big group of tourists descended on the picnic area I was photographing next to. That was my cue to get the heck out of there. Peace and quiet was not to be had in this area, sun was getting higher and hotter too.

I headed back down Mouse’s Tank Road, the way I had come, and pulled over at Parking lot 1. There was a big line of cars behind me (everyone’s in a damn hurry!). As I watched the cars go by in my side mirrors, I saw this awesome S curve in the road. I grabbed my camera and shot it in the mirror. I had seen similar shots on YouTube videos of the park before. I didn’t want to take the same exact shot, but I had to. The one looking at it through the mirror is cool. Perhaps I should have cleaned the mirror first??? I took several shots. There’s something about a curvy leading line into a beautiful scene of red rocks that draws you in.

After that I continued south and encountered another herd of bighorn sheep. Just munching away on the bushes, paying traffic no never mind. As soon as I passed, I drove down Fire Canyon Road, wanted to see what I could l see, and then decide where I wanted to shoot the sunrise tomorrow morning, or maybe a sunset later in the day. When I pulled over at a paved pull-out, my 100-400 kept giving me those damn Err messages. Over and over, Err. So I had to put the 24-70 back on. I was so frustrated by now. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the lens. I couldn’t shoot these mountains or rock formations with the small lens! Kept playing with it when I got up to the end of the road, but nothing. Nothing I did would make the Err go away. My lens was dead. Oh, I was soooo upset and frustrated. I tried photographing this epic vista, but all I kept thinking was “I’m going to have to crop the crap out of this to make it look decent!” That was enough to make me want to stop. Then I thought, “maybe the lens just needs a good cleaning”. I’d head back to the campsite, plug in, grab some lunch, and try to clean the connections with a nice clean lens cloth. So back to the RV I went, and that darned warning light was still illuminated. UGH! By now I figured that it might be tire pressure. I’d find out when I got to the campsite.

After getting to the campsite, and making sure it was level, I went to plug in my shore power plug, when I realized that the utility tower I saw earlier was just a water spigot, and not even a threaded one! It was just a faucet! Ugh… are you kidding me?! NO power?! NO water?! That about sent me over the edge. Bad enough my stove didn’t work and I had to (forgive me) microwave my hamburgers, but I couldn’t even do that now without electricity. I’d have to run the generator, and the generator ran off of the vehicle’s gas. I only had about a half a tank of gas, enough to get me to a cool sunset or sunrise point and back to Overton to fill up before heading to Kanab on Thursday. I didn’t know how much gas it would take to run the generator. Super frustrated by now, I decided to head into Overton to fill up with gas and check the tires. Maybe stop at a grocery store for some more ice, pre-cooked food, and a 12-volt USB charger (the kind that fit into car cigarette lighters).

So back to Overton I went. Stopped at the only gas station in town, filled up (yes, I remembered to turn off the propane!) and then went over to the automatic air compressor. This was a fancy compressor, even took credit cards! Good thing because I was saving my quarters for the laundry machine. So the trick was to enter the number of pounds of pressure your tire is SUPPOSED to have into the machine, then fill the tires, and the tire inflator thingy would sense when it got to that amount. When (and if) it reached the proper pressure, it would stop filling. The only problem with that was my tires took 80 lbs of pressure, the machine only went up to 70. The first 3 tires were fine, all at 80 lbs. But the last one, the furthest from the display (good luck seeing that number from so far away) was below 60 lbs (I think). I got it up to near 70lbs again before it shut off. Not liking that tire being so low on pressure, I called renters assistance. The guy I spoke with said “no problem, you can drive that down to 40, even 20lbs of pressure.” I thought, “what? Noooo that can’t be right”. But, what could I do? I decided to just do what he said. I headed back to the campground, knowing I had at least 60lbs of pressure and should be enough, maybe, hopefully. I stopped at the grocery store. Picked up a cheap tire gauge in addition to the other stuff on my list. I could at least check it before driving too far on too-low of tire pressure. Then, with a full tank of gas, a semi-full tire, and groceries, back to campsite I went.

Back at Valley of Fire, I parked and made sure I was level again, and fired up generator for the first time. Pretty simple, just push a button. But damn was that loud! I certainly won’t be using it for very long. But I had to cook my burgers, recharge my Anker backup battery, camera batteries, and my laptop. So I put my hamburgers on a plate and into the microwave, 30 second bursts, then flip. I did that, oh, half a dozen times till I figured they were cooked relatively through. No well-done burgers for me! Laid some nice Monterey jack cheese on them and a generous helping of mustard. Mmmm, a hot meal. I hadn’t eaten any thing hot since I left home. While nuked burgers weren’t ideal, they weren’t terrible, and I was hungry. As I waited on the burgers, I went to plug every charger I had in any outlet I could find. Wouldn’t you know it, I could only find two standard outlets that worked! There were 2 more back by the upper cabinets of the kitchen area that had no power whatsoever. I had one over the dinette and one in the closet that had the microwave plugged into it. I would have killed to have my Jackery along with me about now. But you can’t take them on a plane.

So while I sat there, eating my nuked burgers, the wind picked up. Holy cow, it looked like old documentaries from the dust bowl. It was horrible! I had to shut my door, and then my windows as my RV and burgers were being blasted by blowing sand! It was hot and windy, and miserable. What else could go wrong?

I think I ran the generator for 2 or 3 hours. All my batteries and laptop were finally charged, so I shut off the generator. It was time for me to cool off, so I went to check out the showers and get clean! A nice shower would do me good. Not that the showers were anything to write home about (there would be an awesome one next week – so stay tuned for that bit of juicyness!) but it was enough to get me clean – and boy did I need it!

Finally clean and fresh again, and a bit more cooled off, I looked at the beautiful scenery just around the campground. My whining frustration of losing my 100-400, and all the other mishaps, went away. I decided to make the best of what was in front of me and just take the short lens out for a walk around the campground. There would be no going back to Parking Lot #2 for sunset or sunrise (not comfortable driving with a tire that may or may not have proper pressure). I figured everyone has shots of the “must see” areas, but how many photograph around the campground? Not many I would assume. Just taking a “stroll”, no hiking boots, no heavy equipment, no tripod, just me and my camera and short lens. Calm returned to me again as I walked around. There was a cool breeze now that the sun was lower, and I noticed many cool things right next to my campsite. Further into my walk I regretted not bringing the tripod as I had to stand VERY STILL to try and get some bracketed shots, some focus stacking, and even a pano (not sure how well that worked), but I did my best. As night was drew to a close, the sky turned darker and I couldn’t shoot hand-held anymore. Back to the RV.

This made me stop and pause, looking at this, wondering where I had seen this or what it reminded me of. The cover art of the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald! Of course.

Post trip research tells me it’s called ‘Celestial Eyes’ by Francis Cugat. You be the judge. Similar? Ok, it’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination.

Desert Globemallow growing next to the rock wall.

I had to throw in a shot of this campsite. It’s in the walk-in section. The rock arch behind the tent is the same arch in the 2 photos above. How cool to sleep among this?

The rock formations found here are astounding. How they were created boggles the mind.

I made myself a little nighttime snack, downloaded my images, and went to processing. I even bought their daily wifi for $8. I was sure my friends back home were wanting to see some of the spectacular scenery. The wifi speed left a lot to be desired. Photos took forever to upload. Some wifi it was... But, that processing and uploading session drained my laptop battery, again. Its only good for a couple hours anyway. Oh well. Tomorrow would be better. I decided I would scour the RV section of the campground for an empty spot the next morning. I had to have electricity!

So off to bed. The wind had died down some just before sunset so there was just a slight breeze blowing in the windows now. Nice sleeping weather. Sure beats the dustbowl of the afternoon. Time to put this awful day to bed.

(Don’t miss my “Nature First” rant from today in my post script to follow.)