I think the rest of the vacation can be blamed on my brother. Yep, it must be his fault. Don and I were doing our best “hide from mosquitoes under light blankets on a hot night” act when we heard a diesel rumbling up the four-wheel road to our camp. It was almost midnight. Yes – Terry had arrived!

In the morning, we all decided to head on out and see what we could find. We took the Whitehorse Ranch Road, a wide gravel highway that connects the Fields to Winnemucca Highway with US 97. We hoped to see where it had rained the night before, but any rain that fell was quickly absorbed by the parched earth. We saw a few animals moving about in the early part of the day: a couple coyotes, some antelope*, and about thirty vultures parked on the road, working over the tiny carcass of a poor little jackbunny. Road kill must be at a premium when it takes that many vultures to eat one bunny.

Another digression: antelope. Ant-ELL-oh-pee. Say it quickly a few times and it grows on you. I can no longer say “ANT uh lope” because I have used the other for so long. It’s one of those weird word games that used to leave my poor husband out in the dark when my family would get to talking about things. But Don has been assimilated and he calls them AntELLohpee, too. Back on Glass Mountain, he was having a hard time getting his binoculars to work as we watched a nice buck about 300 yards away. When he handed the binoculars to me, he realized one of the end eye pieces still had the cover on. Oh. NOW it works.

We made up stories about the people who live on Whitehorse Ranch Road. Terry had little walkie-talkies so we could work on our compositions. We were buzzed by a light airplane taking off at Whitehorse Ranch, headed toward Boise. He turned around shortly and returned home. Then we met his errant teenage daughter driving home from a wild night at Burns Junction. Decided she was in deep trouble if dad had to get the airplane out to look for her. (Story is NOT true: we saw the airplane as described and met a car being driven by a young woman – that is true).

The road connects to US 97 just north of a place called Basque, where ODOT keeps some heavy highway equiptment. When I was a kid, sighting Basque meant we were close to Burns Junction and that meant we might get to do a potty stop. If we did a potty stop, we could look at the geodes that were proudly displayed everywhere (and then some). Nowadays, someone else owns the junction and the thundereggs are long gone. On this day, we were busy passing slow semis when my brother called and said there were “clowns” coming. I wish I had known that nomer before: by “clowns” he meant the idiots who pass on solid yellow lines, on hills, against traffic, without enough clearance. Sure enough, that’s what the clowns did. I’m sorry, but there is absolutely nowhere in southern Oregon that requires a person to be in such a big hurry.

Our plan was to camp outside of Burns Junction along a state wayside, where the map we had indicated there was some roadside geology to be explored. The wayside used to have a fountain and here I’d like to extend my sincerest apologies to the person whom we caught with her pants down (literally) when we pulled in there to confer. She tried vainly to hide behind the garbage can and we tried to give her the privacy she needed, but… Did I mention there’s no portapotty at the wayside?

We found the road out to the ’site of interest’, but everything was marked with mining claim markers. Opalite? Not sure and still having a time finding out. We drove around a bit, then decided to walk out onto this white clay stuff that is marbled with red. The texture was that of kitty litter and a lot has been hauled out, but the miners were careful to remove all trace of their equipment except the holes and tailings they left. I don’t know how hot it was out, but between the white clay and the hot sun, this woman was beginning to feel pretty out of it. I headed back to the rigs, slowly realizing that I was on the verge of becoming disoriented. I knew where I was headed, tho, and made that my goal so the men wouldn’t know how I was really feeling. However, my face turned a shade of red that was unmistakable and they knew I was in bad shape.

We stopped at Rome Station and decided to have lunch. After a huge lemonade and holding my head under the restroom sink’s faucet, I began to feel normal. It’s a wonder I didn’t have heat stroke, but all I did was develop a wonderful dark tan on my face and arms (not my legs: I had long pants on) and worry the men a little. The saving grace was probably that I was well hydrated and I knew I was headed that way when I walked back to the rigs.

So now we had no place in particular to camp and rain approaching. We were headed to Jordan Valley and thought we’d check with the USFS there on fire conditions. Since they had crews everywhere (housed mostly at the fairgrounds), we thought that would be an easy task. Finally found the BLM office where the local official told us that he had no idea what was going on: the agencies weren’t speaking to each other. But he did know that the road to Silver City, Idaho, was fine and that we could still camp there – they were not in danger of burning up as that fire was considerably south. He gave us our first ominous hint of the Boise BLM District when he said he couldn’t obtain a map of Idaho BLM.

My brother asked the gas station attendant for directions into Silver City. Silly man! Every out-of-stater that has asked a gas station attendant in a rural town in Oregon for directions has ended up lost. And very often, dead. (Apologies to the Kim family). Fortunately, Don & I are not out-of-staters in Jordan Valley and our gas station attendant actually gave us good directions.  We were headed to Silver City with plenty of daylight to spare.