Today was a bit of a relocation cruise. After packing out of the resort, we headed down to the Badwater Basin salt flats, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level.
Then we said goodbye — or at least, “until next time,” — to Death Valley and made our way up to a fast charger at Amargosa Valley. I’ll admit I was sad to leave the park on a paved road. Or at all. We got gas and electrons over a hood-lunch and map planning.
The plan was to head to Las Vegas, top-off gas and batteries north of town, then hit the Nellis Dunes in Las Vegas Dunes Recreation Lands — what looked like an off-highway-vehicle park in the sand dunes northwest of town. Once we arrived, we realized this was probably only used for ATVs and that regular vehicles may be either against the rules. Or at least sufficiently against local customs to create a scene. So we moved on, but not before Andrew did some donuts in the Rivian. We’ve been asked to keep those sights to ourselves for the time being, but I offer this instead:
That is a happy driver. In a dust cloud of his own making. He and that vehicle have done well by each other these past few days. I’m glad he came along.
We didn’t have much time left before the sun went down, so we decided to swap Valley of Fire State Park for a road over Mormon Mesa instead. The mesa sits at the confluence of the Muddy River and Virgin River at a height of almost 1900 feet and is a lot more fun than taking I-15 through the Virgin River Gorge, which I did last year. The road connects two large electrical substations and snakes between power poles over the mesa and through several washes.
The start was a rousing game of Mariokart beneath the power poles. We weaved through sandy banks trying to kick traction out of control while heckling each other. It was great times. And then George made a discovery:
Yes, that was the moon.
The top of the mesa was a cobblestone catastrophone, bouncing us around on unforgiving surface. I was starting to worry the rest of the road would be like that until we had a dramatic downhill back into the wash . The rest of the road was fun, though I wish we’d been able to see it in daylight.
The road met up with the substation on the far end and dumped us out onto Riverside Drive in Bunkerville, a few miles down from Mesquite and our lovely CasaBlanca Resort and Casino.
This was Andrew’s final day with us. In the morning, he’ll head back west to Palo Alto. Upon his return, he’s expecting the team at Rivian to do some inspections while he has a few more days of well-earned vacation. George, Evan, and I will be heading back down into Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument and Bar 10 Ranch for some new road and some favorites.
This might also be the last internet access I have for a few days. I’ll post a couple check-ins along the way so you know we didn’t fall in the big ditch though.
It was good fun to have Andrew along, and it was fascinating to bring an EV along on this trip. This is probably the first time an electric vehicle has done at least some of this.
Evan maintains that the EV is “the LaserDisc of Cars” — a short-lived video format of the late 90s with VHS-ish-quality stored on an optical disk the size of a vinyl EP. But it took LaserDiscs to get us off magnetic-tape cassettes and into to DVDs and Blu-Ray.
Evan thinks that the ethical, environmental, and logistical issues with batteries will send us looking elsewhere for the future of cars — that the EV is a step on the path of “we have to try something new.” But when I look at the progress of batteries over even the last 5 years, I think, “well, if we get a car running well on electrons, then we can swap out the generation and storage mechanisms as we learn more.” Could go either way, I suppose, but this is definitely a huge shift. And this shake-down of the R1T went pretty well overall.
