2003 02 Nevada

Well, today started as a day running from the weather.  I got up at 5 in Elko and went out to some really nasty wind.  It was completely overcast and looked to start raining or snowing at any time.   It held off for a while, but by the time I was headed out at 7 it was raining very hard and was quite windy. I had expected snow, but I guess not.  I had spent the time between 5 and 7 being alternately bummed out by not being able to photograph what I wanted in that area and looking at the weather and deciding where to go instead.. (It's amazing how much weather information is available now online.  I looked at the NWS web site ( National Weather Service - Elko, Nevada from National Weather Service Home Page -government warnings & forecasts) as well as the Yahoo weather, and between them decided to go south.  The most useful thing for me is to look at the NWS text predictions and the regional satellite animations available on Yahoo.  Really cool to be able to do this.  If I had to rely on the radio or TV weather I would not have made nearly as informed or as good a decision as I did.)  Anyway, I went east on 80 in a driving rain and then went south on 93, which is a great drive. After 30 or 40 miles I was in sunshine!

So on the way I took some panoramic stuff of "basin and range" in the snow.. this is the Steptoe Valley.

I did a lot of stopping, and at a place called Cherry Creek this appeared north and west of me:

Isn't that second image the coolest thing?  It looks like a tornado coming!  I shot some film of this which I think will be nice.  It was very windy and I did not get too much film shot before I was in the driving snow seen in the last image.

I continued south towards Ely and drove out of this, but it followed me all the way there, and as I was having lunch it came over the mountains with a large whomp and it snowed hard.  This was discouraging.  In fact, after some internal grumbling about this I gave up, was happy with the decision, and said to myself I am just going to head back and do all this another time.  That would have been perfectly OK.  So I headed west on 50, but by the time I had gone 50 miles it was bright and sunny again!  So I did some more shooting and turned around.  I'll just take this day by day ..  I have a list of places to visit or revisit in the Ely area.  One of them I got to a little today.

That is the mining town of Ruth, and the rather enormous Robinson copper mine.  Here are a couple shots of the town, dwarfed by some of the many many many acres (hundreds?  thousands?) of tailings, and a couple of the main mine pit.  I will go back tomorrow.. there are some ghost towns and other interesting places that will fill the day.  Or two ..