Friday, May 2, 2014

OTBR: Stony Ground in Nevada

Latitude: N 38° 14.556
Longitude: W 116° 20.016

A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.

After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".



  • on stony ground with sparse, stunted bushes off US 6 in Nevada, a few miles east of where the Extraterrestrial Highway splits off
  • in a residential neighborhood in Surprise, Arizona, near a solar farm and elementary school and not far from a prison
  • on a dead-end street with irrigated fields on both sides in Fallon, Nevada
  • in the middle of Maryland's Susquehanna State park in a field used to grow hay ("I got to see an American Bald Eagle while approaching GZ")
  • aside the street that winds up the hill to the Museum for the Culture of Industry in Osnabrück, Germany
  • on the railway tracks very close to the train station of Germersheim, Germany ("Beautiful scenery for railway enthusiasts")
  • in stinky, slimy mud of the mangroves on the shore of Queens Lake in New South Wales
  • in deep woods beyond the railroad tracks, but just scoreable from the park baseball fields in Arnold, Missouri
  • in Foster Park north of Ventura, California, but unreachable due to one of the camping areas being closed for some reason
  • in Iowa, on land that looks like it had been pasture, but is reverting to woods, 1600 meters from ethanol plant
  • in a private estate full of multimillion Pound houses north of Birmingham, England
  • near one of the large homes in the woods lining the bank of Virginia's Lake of the Woods ("The drive out was very pretty, with numerous dogwoods, redbuds, and wild cherries in bloom")
  • near Mablethorpe, a seaside town on England's East Coast, on the corner of Main Street and Rossa Road ("it was more of a country lane than a Main Street to be honest")
  • in Nebraska, in an unfenced and still unplanted cornfield ("Nebraska is slowly shaking off winter so the treebelt along the Elkhorn River is still completely brown")
  • in Palmdale, California, on the grounds of a private fishing club which owns Palmdale Lake, a small sag pond more-or-less right atop the San Andreas Fault
  • a new western extreme in Wisconsin, in an area logged of pines ("The walk was tricky because I had to step over or around the slash from the logging")
  • unreachable just off the runway of an active private airport outside of Chicago
  • on the property line of Virginia's Pony Heart Farm, which offers horse riding and boarding
  • and near a large, lichen-covered boulder in the Morgan Territory Regional Preserve north of Livermore, California, a beautiful park with tons of trails leading through hills and forests of oak and madrone

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