Nevada and Idaho

Time to catch everyone up on where we have been the past two weeks.  We left California behind after our visit to the Bristle Cone Pine Forest and took the turnoff from US 395 onto US 6 in Bishop, CA.  A sign shortly after the turn notified us that we were on the longest US highway in the country.  The other end of US 6 ends in Cape Cod, MA.

We stopped at Walker Lake and spent two days there.  Walker Lake is a remnant of a lake that once covered much of the Great Basin.  We did some geocaching and visited a museum in nearby Hawthorne.  Hawthorne has the distinction of having the largest Army ammunition depot in the world.  The museum was mostly about the different kinds of bombs and ammunition the Army uses.  Interesting and free.

We then moved on to Winnemucca, NV.  We found a BLM campground in a canyon above town called Water Canyon.  There was a nice stream just behind our trailer and it was a nice place.  Again we did some geocaching, including being the "First to Find" for one cache that had been planted in the area just a few days earlier.  That is our first FTF.  We spent two days there.

Then we moved up to Nampa, ID, a suburb of Boise, and rented a spot in an RV park for the first time since leaving Frazier Park.  We need to do that about once a week so we can do laundry, etc.  We had a nice visit with Robin and Ken both nights we were there.  The second night they took us out to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant with an outdoor patio that overlooked a woodland by the river.  It was very nice.

We then headed north from Boise into the mountains.  We followed the Boise River into the wilderness and climbed up and over, down and around.   The country was beautiful but the going was slow.  We stopped just south of Stanley, ID along the Salmon River where we spent two nights in a forest service campground.  The river was just a few feet from our rig.  It was cold and rainy for the two days we were there, but we enjoyed the stay anyway.

The Salmon River is also known as The River of No Return.  It is a very fast flowing river as it cuts its way down out of the Sawtooth Mountain range.  We followed it to a spot just south of the town of Salmon, ID where we found a large parking area by a boat launch and spent the past three nights.  Saturday we drove into town and visited the Sacajawea Interpretive Center.  Salmon is located where the Lemhi River joins the Salmon river, and Sacajawea was born here in the Lemhi Valley.  She was captured by another tribe when she was 11 or so, and taken to live with them in North Dakota where she was married off to a French trapper.  The following year Lewis and Clark hired the trapper and her to guide them west.  She returned to her village here along the Lemhi as they moved west, and then on to the Pacific Coast, returning with the party to North Dakota.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of information about Lewis and Clark  in the area.  Yesterday we took the scooter and followed the Lemhi River to its headwaters near Gilmore Summit about 60 miles southeast of here.  The valley runs along the foot of the Bitteroot mountains which are still snow capped and beautiful.  We had a great ride, stopping to read all the information signs along the way, and climbing from 3,000 feet to over 7,000 at the summit.

Today we will leave Idaho and move into Montana.  We plan to spend a day or so visiting Dianna's cousin Judy in Dillon, then we will explore more of the areas in Montana we have not seen before.  We still have a month until we pick up Dom in Minneapolis, so we have plenty of time to see things along the way.