Ward Charcoal Ovens

When Dave first started his job outside of Ely, I drove out there on my days off. I decided to take the whole day to drive out there, then we drove back the next day after he got off work. I'll post a few pictures of the drive soon, but the 2nd day I was there, I went to a couple state parks nearby in the morning.

Ward Charcoal Ovens was the first park I went to. It's a state historic park like Fort Churchill. It also has a campground and hiking trails.

The ovens were used to produce charcoal. Nearby trees were cut down and stacked inside. They were then lit on fire and slits in the walls (visible near the bottom) were used to control the heat and speed of burning. They didn't want the wood to burn too fast, because then it would produce ash instead of charcoal. These ovens were used from 1876 through 1879 and use stopped when the available timber ran out. After they were no longer used to produce charcoal, they served as shelter for prospecters and eventually outlaws like Butch Cassidy.

A really good friend of Dave's, Allen Wooldridge, is the ranger at Ward Charcoal and Cave Lake State Parks. They are so close together, the same supervisors and rangers patrol both parks. Allen lives at Ward Charcoal. These are his chickens!

Allen also "bribes" local ducks to live at his pond so they clean out the algae. He has some pretty good-sized fish in there too. I wish I'd had my camera, instead of my cell phone for pictures because that area is beautiful! I don't have any pictures yet of Cave Lake but I definitely want to go back.

Full Moon Hike

I did full moon hikes at Dead Horse Point and they were pretty popular, so I decided to try some here at Fort Churchill. There is an easy 0.6-mile trail that goes around the ruins of the Fort so I thought I'd start by talking about the moon (on May 5--the first hike--it was a Perigee moon, where it was at its closest point to the earth and a full moon) then talking about the history of the Fort. As we walked through the fort ruins, I wanted to stop and talk about the buildings and what life was like for the soldiers. I made hardtack, which they would have eaten as they traveled because it's light and stores well.

The moon just starting to rise over the mountains.

We advertise in the newspapers, through Nevada Magazine, the Silver Springs Chamber of Commerce, the Nevada Council on Tourism, Facebook and Google Calendar. Even with all that I didn't expect to have 51 people show up! The region manager was there--brought his kids--so I was really nervous because it was the first one and I didn't know what to expect. He told me later that his kids went back for seconds on the hardtack (I thought it was nasty, but I'm glad the kids liked it!).

This is the line of people from the museum down the trail, and more people still hanging out at the museum. I'm curious to see if we have that many people in the next few months.



It ended up going really well--since I was so nervous, I made sure I knew the material really well. I did have to condense some of the stops because sometimes it's a long wait for the whole crowd to catch up every time, but it still lasted about an hour.

Right when I started to talk, the sprinklers went off on the lawn! No one got soaked (maybe a dog or two) but I was still embarassed...next month, the sprinklers are going off the day before! I never had to worry about sprinklers at Dead Horse Point, because we didn't have grass to water! Oops...

It ended up being a really nice night--no wind, no bugs, good temperature...I was happy!

This isn't the clearest picture, but you can just make out the Fort ruins lit up by the moon. I'm thinking maybe it should be scheduled later, when the moon is already up in the sky so it's brighter, but it was also fun to see it rise.

Steller's Jay!

It didn't take long for the visitor to arrive after we set up the campsite...

Got any chips?

Nothing yet....I'll come back later.

This Steller's Jay kept an eye on the campsite in case we left an un-guarded bag of chips or hot dog bun laying around.

Solar Eclipse

This will just be a short post about the eclipse yesterday. Dave tried to get a picture of the sun but the camera wouldn't cooperate (I think he's the one who told me it's bad for the camera...hahaha). I remembered that you can put a pinhole in a piece of paper and project that image onto another paper so we did that instead. Dave tried to get a picture of that too, but he kept blocking the sun with the camera so it didn't work.

This is what it would have looked like, except our image was smaller. The clouds came over before we got to see the whole thing but we did watch it get dark while the sun was covered.

It was pretty exciting--I like that kind of stuff, and it was way better than the movie we were watching!

Old Cowboy House

Across the highway from where I live, there is an old cowboy house made out of mud (adobe?)! After looking at for a month or so, Dave and I decided to check it out. I wouldn't have gone over by myself.....but it ended up being pretty interesting.

We parked on the road and walked across the field to get to the house. I was surprised there are no fences around it but there are so many of these in the area people pretty much leave them alone.

We guessed that it's been here since the 1800s, since that's when this area was developed. My guess was 1850s or 1860s but I'd have to do more reading about Yerington to know for sure.

We didn't go inside, but Dave stuck his head in a window to get this picture. I'm too much of a chicken to even stick my head in. It does look like it was used "recently" like in the 1940s (again just a guess, I'll do more research) because it was retro-fitted with electricity. From the looks of things though we were smart not to go inside...hantavirus is an issue here and it looks like mice and packrats have been using the place for their own homes.

Another interior view...