We had 4 choices of roads to utilize on our way back North from Gerlach: Route 34 that we already did half of, go back up Soldier Meadow Road, go East to Winnemucca and slog up the highway, or take a series of roads snaking back up the eastern side of the Black Rock Desert. We, of course, chose the last option. This consisted of Route 49, Jackson Creek Ranch Rd., and Leonard Creek Rd. I used to think that the area of Eastern Oregon where Fields is located is the most desolate place we could visit. I was incorrect in that assumption. Out by Fields you see cars fairly regularly for such a rural area… out on route 49, I’m pretty sure it might be days before another car passed by. It was glorious. We stopped randomly off one of these roads to look for rocks in the gravel (because I randomly started seeing yellow rocks that looked interesting and told Jason to “stop the car!!!”). At this point it’s been like 3 days and we’ve seen maybe 2 cars that weren’t associated with Gerlach and Empire. You could probably make camp in the middle of the road and no one would ever know. I’d love to come back with a “real” 4WD vehicle and explore some of the back roads, trails, and canyons. There were wilderness access roads scattered about that promised fantastic back country hiking into the mountains. Next time (and there WILL be a next time!) we will plan appropriately and explore a bit more!
I didn’t take many photos on the drive…just sat there and watched the world go by through the window. We did see an interesting cloud formation on our way up to Fields.
There were a few roads that I saw last time we were down by Fields in the Mini Cooper that we obviously couldn’t drive down that I really wanted to try this time, however upon arrival it seemed like every one of them had a large camper parked in the middle of it. Kind of annoying. We eventually gave up and continued into Fields for an early dinner. That was when we learned that hunting season in Harney County had just opened up the previous Saturday and everyone was out with their big 5th wheel and ATV for their yearly excursion. Great…. but at least the milkshakes and hamburgers were still super tasty!
Our destination for the night was the hot springs about 25 miles out Whitehorse Ranch Road…. We stayed there once before and had a totally relaxing time in the hot springs and hiking around the buttes in the area but once we got there we remembered the aforementioned hunting season. The hot springs were packed with shirtless overweight hunters. Yeah, no thanks. So we kept going down a random road roughly on the way to another place the internet indicated had cool rocks to pick up.
Ironically enough, way out there in the wilderness we had full 4G service up on our little hilltop perch. So we googled and facebooked our little asses off all night long. It was pretty nice to be able to look up all the things we wondered about during our 3-4 days without cell service at all. After a fairly restful night we woke up, gave up on the road I wanted to go down due to possible river crossings, and headed back into Fields for breakfast, because why not?
