Ok. So you are driving in Northwestern Nevada, down a dirt track road next to a small river that winds through high desert mountains heading down the road to a old US Army Calvary post called Fort Churchill. As you are driving along the very contrasting Riparian Zone of the Carson River with tan and grey colored hills interspersed with dark brown to near black basalt and volcanic rock outcroppings to your left and on your right cottonwood trees, deer brush, reed beds and a few willow bushes with alfalfa fields now very green.

At times you can hear the water of the slow moving Carson River when the summer breeze is not singing through the branches and leaves of the cottonwood trees. Birds are busy catching an abundance of insects and jackrabbits scurry out of the path of your slow moving vehicle then the narrow valley begins to open slightly wider into a small plain between the river and road and the hills to the left. What you see next startles you a bit!

Hey, that looks like a couple of hopper cars for a standard gauge railroad and a flatcar too. Yep, I see the tracks! But you already know that the nearest railroad is on the other side of the river and over a mountain as you have already viewed the map of your route to the Fort Churchill park. Then you notice some industrial buildings just a half mile further down the road with chain link fencing on both sides of the road. You stop take a few photos of this latest Nevada desert anomaly and continue your drive to the set of buildings.

As you travel further down the road you begin to make out through the fence, semi-tractor trailer vehicles, low boy trailers, construction  equipment, motor homes and quite a few military vehicles! The question immediately pops into your thought pattern, what is the purpose of this facility and why is it located here in the Western Nevada hills? Finally you see a office building with a sign announcing " Nevada Automotive Test Center". Next you spy another sign denoting "A Division of Hodges Transportation" and you breathe a deep sigh of relief as you realize that this is probably just a Hollywood studio back lot used for making some B-grade action adventure film!
 
You drive past the film prop buildings and stop between in the middle of the road and start snapping photo's of all these mean looking military vehicles. As you are adjusting the focus of your camera you hear a voice coming from the film prop office building and in a squeaky but rough smoky voice you hear "hey you are not allowed to take any photos here"! Now some fellow is walking towards me dressed in torn blue jeans, wrinkly polo shirt and with his feet firmly encased in open toed sneakers. This only confirms the Hollywood film studio back lot concept!

What? You're telling me that I cannot take photos of your plywood armored personnel vehicle props and those wanna be Humvees built on retired Jeep Grand Cherokees? Since I am on a Nevada public road, I flex my citizenship and demand to know why. This fellow then states, as he nervously lights up a cancer stick, "hey I am just a guard doing my job". So I answer this fellow as I unwrap a stick of sugarless chewing gum to help mask the smell of the poisonous weed emanating from the road guard fellow, "Hey Barney Fife, this is a public road and I can legally shoot photos until I run out of film  you know" (yep I was using a digital camera!). Barney said nothing about my digital camera using film but he did relate to me that this company, NATC, has multiple contracts with the US Military and I might be an Al-Qaeda operative or something worse, like a lawyer. Being a US Army & Navy veteran I decided to cease harassing Barney Fife so he could get back to his Gilligan's Island rerun marathon and his pack of cancer smokes.

So I took off in my James Bond getaway car snapping a few more photos as I drove slowly by the parade of vehicles on both sides of the road and in my rear view mirror Barney was happily trotting back to his marathon of Skipper, Ginger and the Professor helping poor Gilligan. I had vested fort Churchill maybe twice as a child in the mid to late 1960's and had no inclination that such a vast test ground existed so close to Fort Churchill! More interesting American history awaited me as I drove Southeast on the Fort Churchill road.

Image and Vehicles Notes:
Of the 2 tracked vehicles in the center of the upper left photo, the vehicle on the left is a USMC AAV-P7, once known as the LVTP-7.  The Marine Corps renamed the LVTP-7A1 to AAV-7A1 in 1984, I guess to be more "Army Emulating".

The tracked khaki/tan tracked vehicle on the right is the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) (formerly known as the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle) which was on 6 January 2011 was canceled by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The program, which was projected to cost $15 billion, had already cost $3 billion! Hmmm maybe some of that $3 billion was spent here on this testing ground! Information via Wikipedia.

To see the remainder of these photos with or without Barney's permission just head over to the PhotoBucket Story page.

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