After the lovely stay at Mono Lake, exploring the nearby historical sites, we headed into Nevada and across the high desert toward Gabbs, then to Berlin Ichthyasaur State Park.  Here, we were the lone campers at the entire park.  The first place I tried to set up camp was steeply sloped, although pretty level side to side, and it didn't work, so we just stopped there and lunched.  Helen wanted me to try a particular pull-thru but it looked like a tough leveling site, so I found a nice level site and was backing in, with Heln behind the trailer on one side and Lizzie behind the trailer on the other side.  Each was giving me different instructiions as I backed, usually dead-opposite of each other.  As I was very tired, this began to be just a wee bit frustrating, so who could blame me when I pulled forward rather quickly to try to straighten out on my own.  I mean, a little pine branch through the open camper door with needles all over the floor was just a memento of the place, right?  The slight damage to the screen door latch was easily fixed with a new screw...

After setting up camp, Liz took a short walk behind our beautiful campsidfe (pictured) and found a desert-bleached dried set of giant antlers from a deer, then we explored the ghost town ruins of the old mine area, and lastly went to the Icthyasaur State Park museum.  Although the museum, which is a large barn-like building encasing a set of icthyasaur fossils, was closed, it has a self-guided tour through large windows where you can view the dig below.  These ancient sea dinosaurs once roamed throughout the great basin area, but here at Icthyasaur SP are large groupings, including the only one preserved in-situ where it was first found, and is now displayed.

That evening, the wind came up and blew in strong gusts (we did not have our awning up as there was plenty of shade around) that made tremendous noise coming up from the desert floor into our canyon.  We saw a ranger drive by, but other than that, we were the only people around and it was very quiet, with only the birds--lots of those, including a beautiful bluebird Helen saw. 

The next morning, we drove nearly all of the rest of the way across Nevada, through many mountain passes of about 6700 feet, up-and-down, with snow covered ranges all around us.  We reached Ely, and are camped in a KOA there, where we could at last have a nace hot shower.  We plan to be here two nights as we re-plenish supplies and explore the area around us.