The Empty Quarter, p. 7
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The next morning we drove out a paved side road (labeled the “Planet eXit”) to a pottery shop owned by an eccentric artist who named his shop “Planet X.” Our Nevada tour book explained the life path that took this aging hippie and his wife to this dusty ranch in the desert. Unfortunately the tour book is one wife behind the times. Judy and I each bought a piece of his work, which is inspired by the colors of the desert earth and sky as well as by whatever recreational chemicals he’s been consuming for the past forty years.
Spying a dirt road branching off into the valley west of Planet X,, we left the pavement and drove into the foothills ten miles away. Halfway up the mountainside to our right we noticed an immense rock mass. This, we later saw from the map, was Indian Rock. Turning onto a second, more rutted dirt road, we climbed up the hillside to the base of the rock. Here, two dirt-road whims off a pavement, the road finally petered out. We walked up the hill until it became too steep for a 15-year old dog. For scale, see Judy’s SUV next to Indian Rock.

Indian Rock
Our final hot spring adventure of the weekend was at the Trego Ditch, 18 miles off the pavement on an old emigrant route linking the mining towns of Winnemucca and Empire. This aptly-named thermal pool is unpretentiously situated by the Union Pacific main line (far left of the VR image), yet it is remote enough to dissuade casual tourists. We were not alone, however, as a group of French Burning-Man types (Burning Frenchmen?) had previously set up their tents. They didn’t mind our joining them, and we all stood up from the baths together to provide a brief show for the locomotive engineer speeding by. Together we rated three blasts of the diesel horn.
A placard nearby identified this hot spring as a milepost on one of the emigrant trails to the west. I found this historical fact interesting, even though it was a bit disconcerting to sit in the same water once occupied by folks who hadn’t bathed since they left Missouri.
By the way, there were no fish in this pool. Really. None.
As the sun lowered in the sky and the January air quickly lost its warmth, we left the water and prepared for the drive back to Reno. While Judy got the her things into the truck, I walked down to the straight-as-forever railroad tracks, where I could see the light of a far-away freight train, its headlight peeking over the curvature of the earth from 50 miles away.

Driving back to the city we stopped to see the last gasp of the sunset. And until the moon rose here in the middle of nowhere we could see sweep of the milky way across the desert sky.