Nature Hike Trail

So for Friday night dinner, we had another taste of a really delicious pizza. This time, we hit a very interesting location, the Blind Onion Pizza & Pub. How often do you visit a unique pizza joint that's also a bar, ice cream parlor, and bowling alley? They make a delicious pizza, and their staff went way out of their way to make us happy, even to the point of giving us the bar's salt and pepper shakers to take back to the hotel with us because they were out of packets of salt and pepper. High marks for the Blind Onion.

On Saturday morning, we intentionally started late, because we knew there was a half-marathon and a 5-K race in Lamoille early that morning. (The American flags and porta-potties visible on Friday when we left were a reminder.) By the early afternoon, when we arrived, there was no sign of the runners. We saved an easy hike for this last afternoon, the "Nature Hike." It was only about a mile, and not very steep or hard to walk. But it was VERY pretty, with an old beaver lodge, river, waterfalls, and LOTS of green.

The old, no-longer-used beaver lodge was huge! The trees and growth were thick and colorful, and the entire area was surrounded by high mountain peaks and cliffs and waterfalls. It was a really nice conclusion to our Lamoille Canyon visit.

As we traveled back to Elko to spend our last night there, while we were stopped to fill up with gas (of course), we talked about the next stage of the trip, the Great Basin National Park. I had been thinking that we would stay in Ely, NV, the closest town with amenities (coffee shops, grocery stores, multiple hotels, population about 4,000). But we realized Ely was quite a long drive to the park, more than an hour, which seemed like a waste of time. So I got out my good old reliable cellphone and searched available hotels in the hamlet of Baker, NV (population 21), 5 miles from the park.

There weren't a lot of options. Both the Stargazer Inn and the Whispering Elms Motel were booked. But there was a room at the Border Inn Casino, which literally straddled the border with Utah (I think we ate dinner in Nevada but slept in Utah). They had one room available, for smokers, but lucky for us it didn't smell of cigarette smoke, and we stayed there for 3 nights without incident. It is one of the most remote places I've ever stayed.