Strolling Amok

Pops goes on tour.

Archive for the tag “Pioche Nevada”

31 Oct 2015

Say Whaaa…?

"Come for vacation, leave on probation. Pioche Labor Day"

“Come for vacation, leave on probation. Pioche Labor Day”

Using its historic past to best advantage, some businesses in Pioche, Nevada still have a lonely few of the above T-shirts available. For some reason, the town of Pioche likes to make a really big deal of Labor Day, with a parade and all manner of events. You can view 2015’s schedule here. Just for fun, their basic website is here, and I recommend pulling it up solely to watch the two tiny promotional videos in the upper left corner. Thirty seconds each, and very, very well done. The whole thing sounds pretty interesting to me!

P.S.: The “Sunrise Salute” on Labor Day itself is pretty impressive, I’ll bet. Last Thursday mid-morning, there occurred the most powerful explosion I’ve heard, not having had the honor to serve in ‘Nam as a lucky teen draftee. From somewhere up on the mountain, it shook the air all around and a family of deer suddenly appeared coming from town, went through the campground, and trotted on out. When I got out of the trailer to look for maybe a blown residential propane tank and smoke, everything looked perfectly normal and stayed so. No sirens, no disaster, no nothing. Mining? Perhaps a little landscape renovation? I’ll never know, but it was BIG. Pioche’s Labor Day wakeup salute is described as “You’ll Hear It and Feel It”, so I have no doubt that they’re not exaggerating.

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28 Oct 2015
25 Comments

Oh, Pioche!

Main Street, and the cafe/bakery on the right dates back to 1907.

Main Street.

[Caution for data-challenged readers: this post contains a heap of fascinating photos, so don’t click on the “-more-” link unless you’re feeling invincible. The photos are very small, but they do add up.]

If you’re driving about in sprawling suburbia and want a change of pace, like something to readjust your familiar assumptions that the entire world consists of huge malls connected by long strings of badly-timed traffic lights, Pioche is just the cure. I counted just one traffic light in town, and that was a single yellow caution light at one four-way intersection – and that wasn’t blinking because it wasn’t turned on. There’s also one yield sign downtown. Pioche tends to use those instead of stop signs. In the downtown area, unmarked diagonal parking is the rule, and long pickups like the Mighty Furd stick out into the two-lane Main Street, A.K.A. Business Route 93. No matter – cars idle around easily, since traffic here is defined by one or two cars, with nothing in sight in the opposing lane. There are no crosswalks – you saunter where you need to, in order to get where you want to get to.

A mine on the outskirts of town. It's hard for me to imagine the drop, but I've read that they hit water at 2,100' down, and had no practical way to pump it out. Today, it's a question of will and money.

A mine on the outskirts of town. It’s hard for me to imagine the drop, but I’ve read that they hit water at 2,100′ down, and had no practical way to pump it out. Today, it’s a question of will and money.

Pioche pretty much started rolling when silver was found there in 1864. At that time, it was part of the Utah Territory, and when the border with the Nevada Territory was later moved, Pioche came with it. Didn’t matter much, since Pioche remained in the middle of nowhere. Its remoteness attracted opportunists along with the miners. In those days, it was sink or swim. If you could not find a way to put food on the table, Read more…

Posted in Campsites, Tourista! and tagged ,
27 Oct 2015
12 Comments

Trippin’ Toward Pioche

Moving out of Wendover is not all bad when lots of little flying friends wait patiently at the screen door to come in and say hi.

Moving out of Wendover is not all bad when lots of little flying friends wait patiently at the screen door to come in and say hi. They gravitate toward whatever side of the trailer is on the draft side of the wind, especially when it’s cooler outside.

Monday began on a path not entirely unfamiliar. Having camped near Wendover for a little over a couple of weeks, I was near completion of breaking camp when a City of Westover pickup truck stopped by. Its proprietor worked at a water treatment plant somewhere up the long, paved climb and had apparently driven past each day, wondering just how much solar panel wattage the Mighty Defiant had proudly been displaying during her stay. On hearing that the total panel power approached 800 watts, he asked whether that was enough to run an air conditioner. He was within shooting distance of retirement, and had a modest rig with a very modest solar system, and found the whole solar thing to be a helpful but deep mystery when it comes to the specifics of possibilities. Naturally, I had to shoot down his hope of moving away from a generator for that kind of thing. I suppose that all those side-hanging panels make for a memorable rig, since I was surprised that he was already aware that this had been my third visit in as many years – something I hadn’t fully realized until he mentioned it!

A low cloud does its thing outside my door.

A low cloud does its thing outside my door.

By the end of the long conversation, he had volunteered that he had gone to culinary school and had a fondness for cooking, which neatly dovetailed with Read more…

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