Road Trip, photo by Harold Davis.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that lately I’ve been to some lonely and lovely places that are surprisingly near to where I live in Berkeley. Here are links to the stories that tell in pictures and words about my autumn trip to Yosemite, the eastern Sierra, and Death Valley. In other words, the Table of Contents…or click here for the whole story (in reverse chronologic order).

	There and Back Again!	Yosemite Valley in the autumn and a map of my trip
	Dark is the Valley in the Morning	Wandering feet in Yosemite
	A Rainbow of Light!	Well, what other kind is there?
	Sunset from Sentinal Dome	High above Yosemite Valley
	Processing a Photo for Flickr	…and Lake Tenaya reflections
	The Hitchhiking Millionaire	Reflections in Lake Tenaya and on wealth
	Risk Management	Sharing Hot Creek with a volcano and a risk expert
	The Deepest Valley	Owens Valley
	Beyond Westgard Pass	Gateway to the desert and Nevada
	Seeking Methuselah	The Oldest Living Things
	Rhyolite and Ozymandias	Ghost Town at Sunset
	Death Valley Sunrise	Desert sunrise from Hells Gate
	Zabriskie Quilt	Patterns in the desert
	Lonely Road	Stovepipe Wells to Lone Pine
	Mount Whitney Sunrise	Dawn on the eastern Sierra crest
	Crossroads of the Cowboy Universe	Alabama Hills
	Homeward Bound	Autumn in the eastern Sierra

Death Valley Sunrise 2, photo by Harold Davis.

After photographing sunset at Rhyolite, I spent the night in a motel-casino in Beatty, Nevada. This motel-casino was truly a disturbing place, with the constant clink of gambling machines invading the air made fetid and stale by old tobacco smoke. Here’s more about my feelings regarding Nevada culture (an oxymoron). View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

Before the sun was up the next morning I was on my way west on Nevade Highway 374. At the Hells Gate entrance to Death Valley National Park, I took a cutoff past the Wonder Mine. A little above the Wonder Mine, I pulled off by the side of the road to photograph the sunrise.

Rhyolite Under Moon, photo by Harold Davis.

Rhyolite is a ghost town at the eastern entrance to Death Valley. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Once Rhyolite was a bustling metropolis with a three-story shopping district, carriages, and fashionably dressed people.

Today there’s nothing but the whistling wind, and dusty signs warning tourists about rattle snakes.

When I visit places like Rhyolite, I am inevitably reminded of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Will our civilization–so grand and impressive to us–vanish like Rhyolite and Ozymandias?

Julian, my eight-year old, and I visited Bodie, another famous ghost town, earlier in the year. Here’s the story.

Endurance, photo by Harold Davis.

Bristlecone Pines are the oldest living things in the world, and the largest group of Bristlcone Pines are high in the White Mountains on the eastern side of Owens Valley. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

These trees grow best in harsh conditions where it’s hard for other species to compete with them:

A hike around the Methuselah Grove, where the oldest of the old trees lives, is like a visit to God. If ever there were a real temple or church, this is it.

Methuselah itself is not identified by the Forest Service (the ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest is part of Inyo National Forest). This lack of specific identification is intended to protect Methuselah, the oldest of all living things, from vandalism and souvenir hunters.

But hiking on the trail around the Methuselah Grove, I felt sentience — ancient, sleepy, wise — and that the eyes of the old ones were upon me:

Westgard Pass, photo by Harold Davis.

Westgard Pass lies on lonely Route 168 between Big Pine and the great open desert country of basins, ranges, and valleys. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Westgard Pass is closed to commercial trucking (the road is too narrow, steep, and twisting). Beyond Westgard Pass, to the east is a small, isolated college in Deep Springs, a ranch or two in Oasis, and nothing much else in terms of towns or people until you hit Goldfield or Beatty in Nevada, hundreds of miles away.

Oh yes, at the otherwise barren intersection of Nevada Highway 266 and U.S. 95 there are a series of legal whorehouses in the middle of nowhere. Invariably created from a number of pre-fabs stitched together, these hermetic and airconditioned institutions have big signs saying “Brothel,” “Open for Business,” and “Free Parking All Night.” If you are curious about legal prositution in Nevada, here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, and here’s a site put up by the marketing arm of the legal Nevada prostitution business organization.

As far as I am concerned, human society in Nevada is pretty gross. Stinking of stale tobacco smoke in every room, Nevadans have even managed to make consensual sin with another person look lonely and solitary.

This picture shows Westgard Pass, which I think of as the gateway to the desert, from above.