This was to be a quick trip. My son, Chris, finished the rookie smokejumper training and is now an official part of the team in McCall, Idaho. We hadn’t seen him for six weeks and we wanted to see Chris and the base before his fire season began. Meryl (DIL) flew to Idaho for the weekend.

Dan and I took the truck for the 10-1/2 hour drive.

Part of a Road Trip is seeing the country, but we have driven through Nevada many times, so I decided to give spinning a try. It might still be possible to spin enough yarn so that I could weave a project for the Spinners Lead competition at Black Sheep Gathering July 5-7, a little over a week away. This is the Ashford E-Spinner 3 and it worked great!

Just because I thought I’d spin my way through Nevada doesn’t mean that the landscape isn’t pretty.

A lot of it is desolate and dry but there is a beauty in it. This year there was actually a lot of green in the landscape and the sky was so much bluer than over the Sacramento Valley.

Check out all the colors in this landscape. What an inspiration for dyeing yarn or winding a warp!

At some point north of Winnemucca we were in Oregon. This sign is outside of Jordan Valley, Oregon, just west of the Idaho border.

Idaho! We had to follow a long slow line of cars for several miles past the road work.

Eroded road cut—another form of color and texture inspiration.

We pulled off at a view point southwest of Boise.

An interesting fact about some of the history here and the connection to Hawaii.

The map showed about 2-1/2 hours from Boise to McCall. We planned to drive north and hopefully get close to McCall before dark and find a place to camp. Tune in for Day 2!