And We are Rounding Third

Friday, October 10 through October 11, 2025

We leave the beautiful Coalville area driving through a pretty little valley heading towards Salt Lake City some 40 miles away

At first we trail through a beautiful green valley where farmers are are growing hay and other fodder.

We’ll travel in high country most of the way to Salt Lake so the Interstate can get pretty twisty with 55 mph curves as it follows canyons down to the desert floor and Salt Lake.. We pass the turnoff to the ever popular Park City and Heber.

We reach the valley floor and the beautiful city of Salt Lake (217,283 souls). We traverse the I-80 and I-15 merge, head north towards downtown, then transition onto the I-80 once again and head west.

Passing the Great Salt Lake it appears that lake level is a little higher than when we last passed by about 5 years ago. Interstate 80 continues on more or less west around the south shore of the Great Salt Lake.

The drive now is through dry valleys, over some mountain passes and onto a very flat valley floor. This floor is white, very white as we advance towards some more mountains. Just before we reach the upper elevations the highway takes us passed the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Wiki- The Bonneville Salt Flats are a densely packed salt pan in Tooele County in northwestern Utah, United States. A remnant of the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, it is the largest of many salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake. It is public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and is known for land speed records at the Bonneville Speedway. The Flats are about 12 miles (19 km) long and 5 miles (8 km) wide, with a crust almost 5 ft (1.5m) thick at the center and less than one inch (2.5 cm) towards the edges. It is estimated to hold 147 million tons of salt, about 90% of which is common table salt. The Land Speed Record at Bonneville is in excess of 763 miles per hour!

We come to Wendover. There’s Wendover Utah(1115 souls) and West Wendover, NV (4512 souls). Which one do you suppose has casinos? I’m looking for a convenient place to fuel the motorhome. Of course they are not identified by signage and are hidden by a bluff so we drive right past the exit to the fueling stations. We still have plenty of fuel to take us to Wells, NV (1292 souls), about 50 miles up the road.

The wind has started to pick up and that means I’m doing a lot of counter steering to keep the rig between the lines. I hope it doesn’t get worse. It does…..

The last time we stopped in Wells, business wasn’t doing well at all. The business section suffered heavy damage from a 2008 6.0 earthquake and it has never fully recovered. We are not going downtown so I can’t comment on Wells economy but I can say that truck stop diesel prices are the highest I’ve seen since leaving on this trip. Truck stop cost- $4.00 a gallon. Across the street is a Sinclair station with a truck fueling station- $3.56 a gallon.

So the wind has been a big pain for the last 100 miles. I’ve slowed down to make travel more manageable and that helps. The wind just likes to move the big box out of its lane and into a ditch so I counter steer each gust of wind as best I can. We stay in our lane yet weave around a lot. Wind speed is 25-35 mph from the southwest…… Not fun………

Our destination for a couple of nights is the Iron Horse RV Park in Elko, NV (20,264 souls). We have been to Elko several times but only stopped to stretch our legs. They have a large municipal park that incorporates an events center, an indoor swim center, several ball diamonds and a large shaded grassy area. Best of all- there’s no problem parking big rigs. The Eastern Nevada Museum fronts the park.

Elko has five, yes five casinos I stand corrected- ten.. One would think that the casino income drives the economy. The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is an annual event. According to Travel Nevada- So, where is Elko, Nevada? Sitting just above 5,000 feet, this thriving Nevada city is nestled in the northeastern corner of the state. As the largest town in the region—and therefore a must-stop along the Cowboy Corridor road trip, Elko is both a confluence of Western cultures and a gateway to some of Nevada’s most surprising and untamed wilderness.

Surprisingly, the city’s economy is primarily driven by mining, specifically gold extraction., with the city considered the “capital of Nevada’s goldbelt”. Yes, gold mining is a major industry in Elko, Nevada, with the area being the leading gold-producing region in the United States.

Iron Horse RV Resort is the highest rated park in Elko. It is pretty nice. There are a lot of side by side pull though sites which I normally stay away from but this parks side by side pull throughs are different It has the standard Side by side common use pedestals between rigs but the door side has a lot of grass. It was a nice set up actually. Some of the back in sites had grass and some didn’t. The park would be nicer if all sites had grass.

We’ll stay here two days, then decide if we want to drive all the way to Reno or stop in Winnemucca to break the drive up. Driving all the way to Reno violates our 250 mile rule as it is 300 miles from Elko, so we’ll most likely overnight in Winnemucca- especially if the wind is blowing.

Catch you later!