Update From the Lake: Part of The Return Trip

Okay, so the update isn't supposed to be from Pyramid Lake, and it's a little late (about three weeks), but we did drive by that turquoise gem on our return trip after going to Middlegate the long way (up Ophir Canyon, through Ophir, to Ophir Summit, and over and beyond) and then going to our place at the lake. [I was going to add something about "I. C. Russell's white line" here, but can't find it being called that anywhere, so maybe later.]

I took zero pictures at the lake, if you can believe it. The leaves on our backyard aspens had only partly turned yellow, we had visitors, it rained all of one day. The rain was great: the sound of it hitting our nearly flat metal roof, the smell of it out in the evergreen trees, the almost Alaskan mistiness of it all. We ate out for dinner every night. One night we ate at two restaurants, and due to faulty order taking at the first one, we ate there for free the second night.
After visitors left, I raked some pine needles, disconnnected the drip system, moved one surviving blue spruce and one itsy-teeny black spruce — grown from a seed taken in Alaska — to a space underneath one of the pines.

All and all, it was a good trip. And on the way back, we went the long back way through Pyramid Lake. The back way turns out to be about one hour longer, and by the time we got to Sutcliffe I was hating it and was quite hungry. Hunger can make me cranky; we stopped in Fernley at Taco Bell.
Prior to arriving at Pyramid Lake, while on the long dirt part of the back way, we stopped at a little oasis in the desert, somewhere generally east of Honey Lake, probably located here, which I wrote about earlier.
As we got out of the truck, a huge predator-type bird flew out of the tall cottonwood tree and dropped the remains of a chukkar at our feet. It all happened too fast for me to get any kind of bird description other than dark with a very long wingspan — likely a turkey vulture, golden eagle, or bald eagle, although I suppose osprey isn't out of the running.

We then saw two amazingly shot-up signs. One was here, near Double Check Well, a major road junction if you happen to be going to Burning Man from California. I'm not saying that Burning Man attendees did it — many signs in Nevada are shot up — but I've never seen one quite like these two, and I do know that desert antics have increased manyfold since Burning Man moved to the Black Rock.

Sand Pass Road

Sutcliffe (unreadable miles) <--

Smoke Creek Road Jct 24 <--

County Rte 447 Jct 51 <--

Gerlach (unreadable miles) <--

Susan(?)ville 25 <--

Fish Springs Rd Jct .3 -->

Sutcliffe (unreadable miles) -->

Reno (unreadable miles) -->

Below, underneath red spray paint:

Reno (unreadable miles) -->

Below, with gray duct tape:

Gurlac [sic] 56 mi ... <--