Yesterday we went from Elko to our first stop. The bustling city of Winnimucca. This booming metropolis is home to the buckaroo Hall of Fame. Well I am glad you asked, a Buckaroo is what cowboys like to be called in this part of the west. The museum is in the Chamber of Commerce building in downtown. Many of the inductees into the hall have names like Shorty, Shamy, Leppy, Jiggs and of course Tex. Another little known fact about Winnemucca is it’s the place where Butch Cassidy and Sundance got away with their last big haul and got away clean. Within the museum is a lot of stuffed animals. Not sure why they share the same space as the Buckaroos but very interesting.

From there we went to Thunder Mountain Park. There is no mountain and no park. Frank Van Zant considered himself a Creek Indian. He said that an old medicine woman told him, "In the final days, there shall rise up a place called Thunder Mountain." She said that only those who lived at Thunder Mountain would survive the apocalypse.

So Frank and his third wife drove into the high desert of northern Nevada, 130 miles east of Reno, and began building Thunder Mountain. It stands just off of the shoulder of Interstate 80, which some might say is a poor choice for a survivalist retreat. Apparently, Frank often changed his stories. The belief is that he once told his oldest son: he was driving along I-80, his truck broke down here, and he never left.

That was in 1968 and he started calling himself Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder and began his work by parking an old travel trailer in the sagebrush, pouring concrete over it, and then crawling inside and living in it. For the next 20 years Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder built his domain using a nearby junkyard that provided much of his raw material. The travel trailer was soon encased within a warren of concrete rooms, lit by sunlight filtering through old glass bottles set lengthwise into the walls. Picture windows were made of car windshields. Quite the site. The chief ended up killing himself. I guess he realized there was no apocalypse in the near future.

From there we went to Lovelock Nevada. You can lock your love in Lovelock. There is a public monument that encourages couples to attach a padlock and throw away the key, ensuring that their love will last forever. It is really pretty cool. Fred and I did attach a lock and so are permanently sealed together.

We ended up in Reno and will be winding our way to Las Vegas.