A rural Nevada travelogue, on foot

This is from today's Las Vegas Review Journal, as reported by John Glionna.  The headline is "A Wild Walk Across Rural Nevada." 

Eric Poulin noticed it early on: rural Nevadans rarely paused when they spotted him and his backpack along paved roads, but they always stopped on the more neighborly dirt tracks.

That’s how he encountered the old rancher, who slowed his diesel pickup as Poulin trudged west between the Monitor and Toquima mountain ranges near the town of Belmont.

When locals encounter pedestrians way out there, they’re usually in trouble, their vehicles disabled somewhere nearby. They need water, directions, medical assistance or at least a lift to the nearest telephone.

Poulin needed none of that. Sure, he’d take a bottle of cold water if you had one to spare or, better yet, a cheeseburger, but he was just fine, thank you.

When the rancher asked where he was headed, the 38-year-old Michigan native described a circuitous, half-mad 950-mile expedition across some 17 mountain ranges in central Nevada, a scant part of the route along established trails.

Poulin was bushwhacking across a veritable lost world, through hidden box canyons, seas of prickly sagebrush, dead-tree thickets and imposing walls of thorns. He’d been disappointed by numerous false mountaintop peaks, discovered places where only wild horses make the trails. He slept cowboy-style under wondrous star-filled skies you didn’t see back home in Michigan.

And he was recording it all on video, plotting the coordinates of a new route he christened the “Basin and Range Trail,” so that other intrepid through-hikers might one day follow in his footsteps.