Well as Willey said when he showed up around dark Monday to take a look at grading for the Repository, “Sometimes it’s good just to get out into the country”, which is exactly what I’d done that morning following a trip in to Gerlach for the mail, and the country had looked good…dry, but good.

We [me and the dogs] took Highway 34 out of town through the Hualapai past Jason’s big “Midian” sign, the Burners’ hundreds of containers east of the flats, Mike Stewart’s long abandoned bankrupted luxury horse extravaganza at the north end and up Leadville Canyon with its little stands of turning cottonwoods…

Climbing out of the canyon I made a left to investigate Leadville’s remains; one building, signs of target practice, a crushed mid-sixties Chevrolet…ending deadending up a gulch at a deer camp in a grove of aspen…

[sophisticated target practice]

…down through miners’ middens to the county road and north until it afforded the long view into Long Valley but no further, then back to the diminishing remnants of Little High Rock cow camp and lunch on the blasted plain…

My long-suffering gas stove’s gasket had dried out, so cold coffee all day…ate and  drove around Little high Rock Reservoir until the road became a trail, then turned for home…

West and south, nicely newly graded gravel, the grader unseen though he was out there somewhere, and at the pass a hunters’ camp with a big fifth wheel trailer.  Descended Lost Creek to 447, the map delineating shortcut roads too long abandoned to qualify as such…and so home, 4:30, to walk the dogs around the ponds, barbecue some beef, and as I’m drifting away with my wine looking off the porch east into dark Willey shows up…

M