On the advice of the Churchill County Museum staff we were off in search of the petroglyphs which lie just outside of town and not too far off of the highway. The petroglyphs, or Native American rock carvings for those (like us) that had never heard the word before were interesting to see, but the weather was getting colder, the day was getting later and I still hadn't gotten to see a real ghost town. We had a quick lunch in the parking lot and headed back down the highway.
We made a quick stop in Austin to top off fuel and try to get the guide book stamped but (I think) the Courthouse was closed so no stamp for us. A couple miles outside of town, we figured out the washer solvent we picked up sucked and the windshield was impossible to see out of. We pulled off to the side of the road to throw some water on it, no big deal right? Well, there was a good amount of snow on the roadside and 2WD wasn't grabbing much traction, so into 4-Hi we went. Even 4-Hi was slipping a good amount. There was no traffic coming so I stopped and dropped into 4-Lo to play around. 4-Lo was pulling through the snow fine when Jamie asked if I had the rear locker engaged. I didn't, but figured what the hell lets hit it and see if the rear end slides around a bit. The locker didn't engage right away so i kept driving down the shoulder to make sure it didn't have a problem as we hadn't used it in far too long, and I didn't want to find out it wasn't working in the wrong place. The good news is the locker finally engaged, the bad news by the time it did the shoulder had gotten very narrow and very steep so we it finally did lock and the rear slid out, so we ended up backwards into the ditch. Driving out wasn't happening and we quickly discovered that under that snow was a whole lot of loose gravel. We were pretty well equipped for a self recovery, but it was far easier to flag down the next truck coming down the road and throw the tow rope on to help us drive out. Sorry no pics of this one since I was working on getting the truck out rather than gathering evidence of my mistake.
Once back on concrete, it was time to head to our first ghost town. It was getting dark, but I figured seeing one at dusk and possibly one in morning would be perfect. We had settled on the first destination mainly because it was the closest to us and we thought we could get there while there was still a bit of light left. We had set the GPS coordinates into our Garmin and followed its advice down a dirt road. After a few miles our British accented Garmin asked us to “turn left”. We looked left, and only saw Cows and pastures. We did eventually find some signs of tracks into the pasture but it didn't actually go anywhere. Even in the dim lighting we should have been able to spot any decent sized ruins but saw nothing in the distance that the Garmin claimed our destination was, so we headed back to highway 50 to try our luck further down the road.
