Mackay Reservoir, ID to Soldier Creek Reservoir, UT – 359 Miles
OK, I confess. I’m guilty. After all that talk yesterday about the Interstate Highways and how we always try to avoid them whenever possible, what did we do today? Why, we jumped on the first Interstate Highway we came to, of course. After leaving our campsite at Mackay Reservoir, we followed Highway 93 down to the town of Arco, Idaho where one of those strange quirks of highway planning takes place. Up until this point, Highway 93 was heading due southeast. At Arco, one of those dual-numbered highways where two highways of different numbers, US Highways 20 and 26, share the same roadbed and pavement comes up from the southwest. What do you suppose happens when these intersect? Highway 93 turns back 90 degrees to the southwest and becomes a triple highway, 20, 26, and 93. Meanwhile, Highways 20 and 26 turn 90 degrees to the southeast as the direct, straight-ahead extension of Highway 93. Suddenly an unknowing person driving along on Highway 93 with his mind on what he’s going to have for lunch looks up and sees he’s now on Highway 20/26. Confusing, eh? (I picked up the eh? in Canada). But like a good Boy Scout, I came prepared with a map so I knew I was OK.
Past Arco, the road leaves behind the ranches and irrigated hayfields downstream from the reservoir and reverts back to its natural state, a barren, desolate sagebrush flat. It goes up a slight rise, and suddenly the foothills and the green field and the ranch houses are left behind. It goes on like this for fifty miles. Because this is the outer edge of the Craters of the Moon National Monument lava beds, the land is dotted with occasional piles of broken, black lava rock, ejected from an ancient volcano thousands of years ago and scattered haphazardly across hundreds of square miles of desert. In fact, as you pass through a road cut, you see that the whole area is underlain by a continuous bed of this black lava. What a cataclysmic period that must have been!
Off to the north, a few miles from the highway, we could see a large complex of buildings with a plume of steam rising from one particular area. We had noticed a sign along the road a ways back but it went by so quickly we didn’t pay it much attention; it said something about the Department of Energy. I was thinking that we were perhaps seeing a nuclear power plant. The map showed a small town called Atomic City off on a side road, but it was off to the south and the complex we were looking at was several miles to the north. Then we saw a sign that said something about the Idaho National Laboratories. Neither of us had heard of this before, so Jeanette Googled it on her smart phone as soon as we were able to pick up a signal. (That happened when we reached the Interstate – one of the definite advantages of traveling on these “civilized” highways.) We discovered that the Idaho National Laboratories, or INL, is the Department of Energy’s primary research facilities for nuclear reactor design, that the first nuclear-generated electric power was generated here in 1949, and that the early research and design of reactors for nuclear submarines was done here, as well as the training of the crews that manned and operated those submarines. So we learned something new.
Our blue highway, to use Least Heat Moon’s terminology because it’s actually red on our map, intersected I-15 at Blackfoot, Idaho, just a few miles north of Pocatello. As much as we’d like to stay on the back roads, we’re hoping to beat the Labor Day weekend crowds, so we’ve got a lot of miles to cover and the Interstate was just about our only option. So we merged into the traffic and headed south for I guess about 250 of our 359 miles driven today. We actually spent time on three different Interstates, I-15 to Provo, Utah, then I-84 around the backside of Salt Lake City, and finally I-80 for a few miles until we finally reached US 40, which will take us home.
We always manage to find water to camp by, either a lake, a river, or, as in Alaska, the ocean. Last night were camped by Mackay Reservoir in Idaho, and tonight we’re at Soldier Creek Campground, a Forest Service campground overlooking Soldier Creek Reservoir in the Uintah Mountains about 35 miles southeast of Heber City, Utah. If all goes as planned, we’ll also spend tomorrow night, our last night on the road, alongside another lake, then be home to our house overlooking Marston Reservoir the night after that. What can I say -- we enjoy our lake views.
Note: I'm posting this from the public library in Steamboat Springs, CO on Thursday, September 1. Since tonight will be or last night on the road, I may not get anything written until we get home. I'll also be posting some final thoughts in a couple of days.
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