This is wonderful. My eyes are pulled right down that road.

Any road out of Trona is a good road.

At the risk of going into “holiday in other people’s misery” mode, I always found Trona to be fascinating in a weird way during the times I’ve gone through it on the way out to Death Valley. The town is just so *forlorn*, and add to that the nature of the surrounding landscape makes everything seem that much more dramatic.

The first couple of times I’d been there, it really seemed well on its way to becoming a ghost town – just a few more years and it might be an industrial-era version of Rhyolite or Bodie. Burnt-down houses, abandoned cars, piles of trash everywhere.

When I was there last May, the town seemed to be picking up, and a lot of the more visibly trashed spots had been cleaned up, billboards that hadn’t been changed in decades have been removed or changed, etc. So it looks there is an effort by the town’s remaining residents to make the area more livable.

Madroad driving men ahead—the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the west, spine heights at the world’s end, coast of blue pacific starry night—nobone half-banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the ornaments of great formations in the mist…