Moving East

Wendover, Nevada and Vernal, Utah

We stop again in Wendover on the Nevada/Utah border to see my brother. We have several meals together: breakfast in the Red Garter Casino, a barbecue he makes for us and I cook my rockfish royale for one evening meal.

Wendover is on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats and Great Salt Lake. I take a walk with David and his dog at 6:30 AM up on Three Mile Mountain. It's an interesting place with many caverns that were gouged out when this high altitude place was sea bottom.

There's a lot to see in Wendover, including casinos, the abandoned air base where Col. Tibbets trained with his B-29, later named the Enola Gay after his mom....They have tennis courts, but we fail to take advantage this time.

A shot of one of the roads going to Wendover...

and the road out of Wendover.

We move on to stay for three nights in Vernal, Utah. The most interesting thing we did here was take a lonely desert hike up to the Moonshine Arch.

We carried water, sandwiches and a selfie stick out to the arch.

One day in Vernal, we drove 40 miles onto an isolated plateau and down a steep geological "hole" to a US Government fish hatchery miles from anywhere. They release about 2,000,000 trout a year into rivers, lakes and streams....This is my favorite government agency...hands down..in second place is SEAL team six...

Our third day trip in Vernal is out to the McCormick Ranch to climb a rocky cliff and see the Indian petroglyphs.

We've seen more impressive petroglyphs, but never a more challenging climb to see them. I drop a fiver in the contribution box and thumbtack one of Mrs. Phred's cards in the sign-in shed.

Mrs Phred at the trout hatchery creek...

Moonshine Arch near Vernal.

Phred takes a selfie at Moonshine Arch.

Next stop...Steamboat Lake State Park in NW Colorado.

Wendover, Nevada

The Bonneville Salt Flats is one of the few places where you can see the curvature of the Earth. They're setting up on six foot poles six miles away for the motorcycle runs tomorrow and they are below the horizon...they expect to challenge 400 MPH in the morning....

It's good to see my brother once again.....he deals Texas Hold 'Em at the Nugget starting at 2AM...I ask him to teach me but the game doesn't seem to do much for me....My camera roll still has a few plant pictures from the morning walks in Red Deer, Alberta.

The B-29s of  the 509th composite bomb group trained here prior to the Hiroshima mission. The barracks have seen better days.

More Red Deer pictures.

This is the site of the beginning of the Atomic Age.

Red Deer morning walk....

Phred in Idaho Falls, Idaho....I saw the falls at dawn, but forgot my camera...so use your imagination...

On the road to Wendover...

Wendover at dawn....

The Enola Gay...

Mr. & Mrs. Phred at the salt flats...

Wendover at dawn...We have breakfast in the Red Garter....

Little City, Big History

Wendover, Nevada

The Great Salt Lake and Bonneville Salt Flats are part of the 110 mile drive from Salt Lake City, Utah, to the little border town of Wendover.

My brother works here dealing Texas Holdem at the "Nugget" from 1 AM to sometime after dawn. Colonel Paul Tibbets trained here in 1945 with one of the 15 specially modified "silverplate" B-29s that could carry the "little boy" or "fatman" atomic bombs.

You have to wonder at the black humor or wartime insanity that would lead the Colonel to name such an instrument of death after his mother, Enola Gay.

They spent a lot of time dropping 10,000 pound "pumpkins" around the wilds of Wendover and on Japan in single plane missions before dropping the "little boy" on Hiroshima". The picture below shows a "fatman" being loaded into the bomb bay of a modified B-29 (Modified bomb bay, no armor, no defensive machine guns).

Kit Carson sent smoke signals from Pilot Mountain in 1846 to assure pioneers that there was safe passage. The Salt Flats can turn to mush after heavy rain. Perhaps that's what bogged down the Donner Party before they turned to cannibalism 400 miles further west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The distances in Nevada are deceiving. There are these endless valleys between mountain ranges that appear to be short distances but are miles further than the eye leads you to believe.

Once (about 1980) my brother had a farm 30 miles down a dirt road in one such endless valley. A Mormon settler had somehow built a wooden aqueduct from Pilot Mountain down to the farm that ended in a big pond full of trout. My brother would open a valve and flood his alfalfa fields (sometimes picking up a rainbow trout on an alfalfa row). He had to move out and move his house trailer to some acres he bought near the farm. Vandals knocked out all his windows and burned it all to the ground. They didn't burn his old van, but they did break all the windows.

The Donner Party and Sentinel Chickens

nner Wendover, Nevada

We've covered some territory in the last few days. The RV is back in Moab, Utah. We drove the Toyota 100 miles over the Great Salt Lake desert to Wendover, Nevada to see my brother. He took us out into the desert to see a little lake or spring that percolates up at the base of a mountain range.


You can tell a poison spring in the desert by the lack of insects and other life. Many of them are full of arsenic or selenium. This one was full of little fish and mosquitoes. They put "sentinel chickens" near some of the springs so they can test them for West Nile virus.


Later we walked out onto the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) prepares a strip 80 feet wide by ten miles long for world land speed record attempts every year after the salt dries. When the salt is wet, it's like driving on porridge.

We found a place 25 miles out in the desert on an empty gravel road where the Donner party crossed the salt flats and drove their wagons up over a low pass. That's the party that got stranded in the mountains for the winter (because they got stuck in the salt and delayed) and revived the practice of cannibalism.





After we left Wendover we went in to Salt Lake City. We went to Temple Square and saw a two-hour movie about Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon religion. The movie showed Smith finding a loose-leaf binder filled with gold pages. The binder was full of revelations. It was in a language that only Smith could understand. Smith established the Mormon religion and moved his congregation around the country (New York, Illinois, Missouri). Apparently the Mormons were persecuted everywhere and Smith was killed by intolerant neighbors in Carthage, Missouri. Then Brigham Young took over the church leadership and moved the Mormons to Salt Lake City. Mormons have reputation as hard-working people who shun alcohol, gambling and tobacco. They have a strong evangelical tradition.

Then we caught a plane and flew here (North Carolina) to visit our six grandchildren.

Fear and Loathing in Wendover

Wendover, Nevada - 30 April, 2006

We drive 300 miles north in Nevada though some of the most lonely country in America. Wendover is a tiny town on the Nevada/Utah border on the edge of the Great Salt Lake.

My brother works here as a dealer. He used to be a pit boss peering down though security cameras at the action. He is sensitive, like me, and I imagine he tired of breaking fingers and burying dishonest dealers in the desert.

Mrs Phred and I are immediately pulled over by a Wendover policeman who informs us that Nevada has a helmet law. He calls in my license and registration and lets me go with a warning. He seems faintly amused by meeting grandpa and grandma on a cycle with Florida plates.

My brother works the graveyard shift, so I get up at 4 AM and wander though all the casinos looking for him. A Nevada casino at this time of day is populated by very strange people. You have to study the vacant stare of the slot users with neon glare reflecting from their faces. All the slots take bills now, but they have programmed in the sound of coins dropping.

Most customers here are Mormons from Utah who drive 110 miles over the salt lake to play. We go to the Bonneville Salt Flats in the afternoon and visit the old B-29 base where Paul Tibbits trained with the Enola Gay. There is an abandoned rail line called the Tokyo Trolley where they ran mock-ups of tanks and trucks for target practice.