Dumpstering at SLC

Not as good as at MIA (no M&Ms this time) but I did find some good stuff to eat and some reading material

The popeyes was good, and so was the cookie.

Goodbye Sun, I'll miss you

You gotta love a place where you can sit outside in your underwear in December and soak up some sun. I definitely won't be able to do that where I'm going next. Oh well, that's what summer and vacations are for I guess.

"I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October" - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

An emotional return to Arizona

But I wasn't hitchhiking, my car made it!

I ran into another guy going home in October; Rockin Rodney, trying to hitch with his bike back home to Flagstaff. A cool guy to talk to, I wish I had a truck to give him a ride.

"At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert - Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south." - Jack Kerouac, On the Road
This is my third time passing through Salome in the tire tracks of Jack Kerouac. All three times I was coming home from Canada under emotional circumstances; Dec 2008, Oct 2009, and now Oct 2012. I chose to go this way this time just make the connection with the previous trips.

I never get tired of photographing this old building and sign post



Home!

Cedar Breaks National Monument - finally!

After 4 attempts I finally got to see Cedar Breaks. Every other time I've come through this part of Utah the roads have been closed by snow.

It almost didn't happen this time either. This is the view at noon.

But 4 hours later it cleared up.

Ahhhh!

Bonneville Salt Flats

the end of the road, after this you drive onto the salt

I thought it was funny how all the European backpackers flock to the salt flats in Bolivia. I was just like "yeah we have one of those in Utah"



You can't drive onto the salt right now, it's very wet. This is as far as I got. It's not a big deal, my car isn't got to set any land speed records in the condition it's in right now. It still looks good though.

Silver (and gold) in the Silver State

Found one of my best old coin scores yet at a small one bank town in Nevada! 19 of these were from that bank. The 20th from a different town.

This part of Nevada is a huge silver and gold mining region. Newmont is one of the worlds largest producers of gold. A lot of these mines are open pit gold mines. I'm mostly interested in the underground mine at Leeville, that's where the good jobs are.

Barrick is also one of the largest gold producers. This area is known as the Carlin Trend and the gold here is not romantic like the gold nuggets and veins in the Yukon or California, it's actually submicroscopic, but it's here in massive quantities. This is the way to Leeville

Great Basin Desert

This trip give me another chance to drive through the Great Basin Desert in Nevada. I drove through Nevada on US 50 in 2008 on my way home from Canada. I've been looking forward to seeing it again, this time on I80.

Kam Wah Chung & Company - John Day, Oregon

This is one of those awesome things that you just unexpectedly come across on a road trip. I had never heard of John Day, Oregon, and hadn't really planned on coming by this way except that it was an option to go though eastern Oregon to get to Nevada.

As the plaque says, the Kam Wah Chung & Company store "is the best and earliest known example of a Chinese mercantile and herb store in the United Sates". The store and the interpretive center tell the story of Overseas Chinese in the US. And this is a story that I really love, having seen the Kaiping Diaolou in Guangdong province(a UNESCO site that told the story of Overseas Chinese who came back to China and built tower house fortresses in their old villages with the money they made in the US and Canada). The story of Overseas Chinese is often told in Canada as well, and in a few really good Jack London shorts. It was an important part of the history of the American and Canadian west in that turn of the century time period I am rapidly becoming obsessed with.

A picture of the store from 1909. The bottom story was built around 1870.

The store (the name Kam Wah Chung means Golden Flower of Prosperity) was the work of these two men. Ing "Doc" Hay and Long On. Doc Hay was the doctor and Lung On the business man.

Some things in the store haven't changed much since the 1940's. Doc Hays herbal medicines are still on the shelves where he left them.

Their cooking area

All sorts of interesting stuff was found in the store in the 1970's. Including $23,000 worth of uncashed checks.

unsent letters

And all the stuff on the walls, Cantonese proverbs

ads for the steamship lines that brought many of the Chinese to America

and a mail order catalog from 1905

Another old photo of the building. I had no idea of this areas gold mining heritage. That was the reason almost 1000 Chinese came to this area. The second largest Chinatown in Oregon while the mining was still going on

Sacajawea State Park, Washington

I first visited this park randomly in 2008 when I was on my way up to Canada. It was such a lovely spot that it has stayed in my memory ever since and I've been hoping I could come back on this trip. I made it! I blogged about this park back then too. It's situated at the massive confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers. This was the first place I ever used my little camp stove. Over 4 years of cooking in the car! I wanted to get it out and make dinner for old times sake but I needed to head further down the Columbia before sunset.

The Columbia

The Snake

The confluence

It was a lovely fall day and I explored a bit more of the park than I did last time.

The park is actually quite old. It's more like a nice old city park than what you would expect from a State Park





Disappointingly they charge a $10 daily fee to visit the park. I'm pretty sure they didn't charge in 2008, but maybe they did. Either way I didn't bother paying this time either.

I don't understand charging to use a boat launch. They don't do this shit in Canada, and a lot less stuff is free in Canada than in the US. I'm not sure if this is pretty standard in the US but they definitely charge in Arizona too on the Colorado River. Here at Sacajawea there is no one around to make you pay, but if you leave your car here then you need to display a receipt thingy.

There is a whole book of regulations posted!



The nice little lagoon for boat/kayak launching

Silver Valley, Idaho

Silver Valley, Idaho is the top silver producing region in the world. It is one of three areas in the world that have produced over 1 Billion ounces of silver. One of the others is Potosi in Bolivia and I've been there. The third is in Mexico. This is the historic town of Wallace. Miners came to this region looking for gold but it was silver that was to be the area's claim to fame. Wallace has a lot of old buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is the Bunker Hill Mine, the largest single producer of silver among the mines in the Silver Valley and the biggest in the world too I think, now it's a clean-up site.

I think this is an entrance to the Sunshine Mine, another famous mine in the valley. This one still has silver in the ground waiting to be mined.

It's not just historic mines here. The valley is still a top silver producer. This is the Lucky Friday Mine.

I'd like to work here.