Nevada State of Mind

Back on our telluric adventure we weave through a landscape that looks as though left in the sun too long. We stop at Caliente, named for the hot springs in a cave at the base of the surrounding mountains. It was once the center of a railroad war, as it is the half-way point between Salt Lake and Los Angeles and rival barons wanted to own the tracks. When steam engines were replaced by diesel locomotives in the 1940’s, the division point moved to Las Vegas. Now Caliente seems the backside of an idea, more wish than reality, a semi-ghost town with about 1000 residents.

Here we meet Mayor Stana Hurlburt, whose office is in the old Spanish mission style railroad depot. She shares she is hoping to reinvigorate the town by turning it into a mountain biking mecca, similar to Moab. It has the terrain, to be sure, and no crowds or spandex, yet. She may be on the right track.

We round out the day visiting Cathedral Gorge State Park, a long, narrow valley where erosion has carved stagy spires and basilicas in the soft bentonite clay. It looks like the maria of the moon.

Ranger Dawn Andone takes us on a hike through earth’s artistry, into twisting slot canyons, around church-like steeples, beneath buff-colored cliffs, and by the fluted hoodoos carved from remnants of a great freshwater lake millions of years old. “How did all this happen?” I ask. “Sedimentary, my dear Richard,” explains Dawn.

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Pioche was once the baddest town in the West, badder than Tombstone, Deadwood or Dodge City.

In its heyday as a silver mining center it had 10,000 residents, 100 bars, and 100 whore houses.

Now it’s another living ghost town, and we take the night at the only accommodations around, the old haunted Overland Hotel & Saloon.

We break the seal of night with a home-style breakfast at The Silver Café across the street. Then, we hook up with local historian and amateur gunfighter Jim Kelly offers to show us the Boot Hill Cemetery, where, in its boom years, 72 people died of lead poisoning, croaked with their boots on, before anyone died of natural causes.

In 1873, the Nevada State Mineralogist reported to the State Legislature “About one-half of the community are thieves, scoundrels and murderers.”

Alongside Murderer’s Row, a section in the cemetery with markers for over 100 murderers, Jim hands me a six-shooter, and challenges me to a gunfight. Somehow, I win, and he crumples like a kicked tent down onto the grave of his great grandfather, shot down by local rival.

Back at the long cherry wood bar, both staff and guests alike talk about their encounters with ghosts, including bartender/maid Stephanie Haluzac, who speaks about the many spirits she’s faced over the years. Once she was in the laundry room folding a towel when a heavy glass ashtray came flying across the room. She gave up smoking then and there.

Next we hare past fields of alfalfa and through a couple of state parks centered around man-made reservoirs, Echo Canyon and Spring Valley, both of which might be designated Ghost Parks this time of year. Next we hare past fields of alfalfa and through a couple of state parks centered around man-made reservoirs, Echo Canyon and Spring Valley, both of which might be designated Ghost Parks this time of year.

Almost like a Twilight Zone episode, or The Rapture, every human seems to have been plucked from the landscape, though all the facilities…bathrooms, picnic tables, campgrounds, boat launches, information signs, a stamp machine for the state park passports…are perfectly presented, waiting for a dinner party. It’s nice having these resplendent parks to ourselves, and we take some short hikes, skip some rocks, take some pictures, and then start driving north.

Looking at the map, it seems there might be a shortcut over the Mount Wilson Byway Road. It’s a gravel road, almost entirely through BLM land, that crooks through a volcanic caldera overgrown with pinyons, junipers, and, as we climb higher, snow. This is a stunning drive, past high peaks, around councils of aspens, ponderosa pines, and the exquisite non-existence of right-angled civilization. Even in our GMC Yukon, in four-wheel-drive, we skid and swerve in the ice and snow, sliding sometimes like a fried egg on Teflon, but finally crest the snow-covered pass at 8,900’, looking over to the great girth of original country, and beyond to a sere horizon.

Then we slowly unwind the back side, calipering back down to Route 93, and then northeast to the border, passing along the way herds of roan horses, wild and running, more here than in any place in America.

We drive into the thick, dark wings of night, and finally reach the Center of Nothing, Nevada, featuring the Border Inn Casino, which is half in Utah, and half in Nevada. My phone at bedside can’t figure out the time zone, as Nevada is an hour earlier than Utah, and the digital clock keeps beeping and bouncing between the two.

It’s a chilly, stelliferous night; I can reach up and nearly touch the spill of The Milky Way. It’s so bright I cast a shadow.

This is a privilege, and ancient right. More than two thirds of the U.S. population, about half the EU population, and one fifth of the whole world lives where the possibility of seeing the Milky Way with the naked eye is no longer. Here, it is practically splashing into my lap.

In the soft matutinal light of the new day we make the short drive to Baker (population: 68), then up towards Great Basin National Park, the only National Park in Nevada, and one of the park system’s least-crowded. Along the way we pass a long series of fence posts festooned with whimsical art, from carvings to car parts, tin cans to horseshoes, sculptures to paintings, scarecrows, mannequins and aliens…it’s what locals call “Post”-Impression Art.

At the visitors center we meet Ranger Kelly Carroll, who offers to show us around (we are the only visitors at the moment), and takes us on a short walk in the shadow of Mount Wheeler, second tallest peak in the state. The park is home to the oldest trees in the world, and Kelly tells the story of geology student Donal Currey who, in 1964, came to study ice age glaciers at Wheeler Peak, collecting tree ring data. In a Bristlecone pine he was sampling, his coring got stuck. So he asked permission from the U.S. Forest service to cut down the tree. Once cut, and the rings counted, there was this realization that the felled tree was almost 5,000 years old, the oldest tree ever recorded.

Since then, older trees have been discovered, but their locations are kept secret.

Another ranger, Robb Reinhart, then takes us on a tour of Lehman Caves, one the country’s most richly decorated caverns. Once inside this helical pit, Robb leads us through a limestone and karst passageway on a journey to the center of the earth, or at least toward the fantastic fallout of hypogene forces: speleothems, dripstones, sensuous flowstones, esophagus like tunnels, clear pools, and the carrot-shaped stalactites and stalagmites (memory rule: stalactites hang tightly from the ceiling; stalagmites might someday reach the ceiling) that grow a centimeter every thousand years.

It’s a fairytale world, artfully lit, and I vow to return to bring my sons, and to climb Wheeler Peak.

Now we head west on Route 50, the former Pony Express route. An ad in 1859 read: “WANTED. YOUNG, SKINNY WIRY FELLOWS. Not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. WAGES $25 per week.”

The route is now known as the Loneliest Road in America. In 1986, Life Magazine ran an article about Nevada State Highway 50 entitled “The Loneliest Road.” An AAA spokesperson had described the route through Nevada in these words: “It’s totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they’re confident of their survival skills.”

So many things about Nevada seem counterintuitive. In that vein, Nevada tourism officials seized on The Loneliest Road pejorative as a marketing slogan, and created signs, stickers and brochures touting such.

They were right, though, as the lonely quality also makes this one of the most sublime corridors I have ever experienced. Much of the time it reminds me of Jerry Bruckheimer’s film intro logo, the boundless straight road and the lightning bolt. After hours of nothingness, it seems we’re driving ever closer to the origins of the earth. A tumbleweed sweeps across the road, whispering some hoary invitation to explore beyond the pavement.

So, we make a short detour down a gravel road into the Ward Charcoal Ovens State Park, featuring a series of six 30’-high beehives built in 1876 to burn locally-harvested timber for use in smelters at a nearby mine. As usual throughout the trip, we are the only ones here, and we step in and out of the giant charcoal kilns, self-stamp our passports, and vanish down the road.

We seem to be navigating a large unfurnished chamber in this next stretch, but it is an occasion with room to think; room to breathe. The interstice is rich here.

In the little community of McGill we stop at the Rexall Drugstore, but it’s not like my neighborhood Walgreens. Stepping inside is like stepping through a time-warp, as though half a century ago the owner went out for a cigarette and never came back.

We’re met by Daniel Braddock, dressed like my grandfather’s pharmacist in bowtie and white paper hat. The shelves are lined with faded products dating back to the 1950s, from the once popular Dippity-do styling gel to Ipana toothpaste.

Daniel, an irenic soul who makes peace with the past, gives an archeological tour down the memory lanes, finally showing off the space in the back where home remedies and prescriptions were mixed in-store, next to stacks of original invoices, dating back to 1915. Before we leave he dollops double scoops of ice cream at the old fashioned soda fountain, and hands them to us to lick vanilla memories.

After days of nights in darkness, we pull into the neon wash of Ely. The road has rendered me unfit for glitter, so I sit in the car decompressing for a few minutes before checking into the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall, which has its own little walk of fame out front. There are stars in the sidewalk for Pat Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. I ask the receptionist why the stars, he replies they are for celebrities who stayed at the hotel.

“Pat Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Same room?” I query.

The receptionist draws a sly smile; silently hands me the key.

We take dinner across the street at the Cell Block Steak House, in which diners sit in jail cells, and are served behind bars by waiters with sheriff badges. The Gunslinger New York steak is to die for. If this is the grub in jails here, I confess to shooting Jim Kelly back in Pioche. Lock me up.

At checkout the morning next I’m handed a little book, “The Official HWY 50 Survival Guide,” which can be stamped at businesses and museums along The Loneliest Road, working towards a state-issued certificate of commemoration. With the day still crisp we head down Route 50 to Eureka, another town defined in ways by what is not there. It was a busy smelting center in the late 19th century, and nicknamed “Pittsburgh of the West.” But, as with most the towns along this route, the mines petered out, and ever since it has been the Big Wait for something to happen next. It today vaunts itself as “The loneliest town on the loneliest road.”

We venture into the Owl Club Bar and Restaurant, noteworthy for its imposing taxidermy, and history of gunfights, dances and rollerball (it was once “The Rinky Dink Roller Rink”). We share lunch with recent owners Eleny Mentaberry and her bar-tending husband Scooter (he calls himself a Precision Carbonation Specialist).

Scooter is part Basque, and there are quite a few in the area, immigrant sheep herders who found a landscape welcoming. He orders me a picon punch, a concoction that includes grenadine, club soda, a float of brandy, and Amer Picon, a bittersweet aperitif made in France with herbs and burnt orange peel. It’s apparently a Basque-American concoction, without antecedent in the old country, and is now the unofficial state drink. I knock it back. It’s tart, assertive. With the glass empty, I’m reeling… “Like a woman’s breast, one is not enough; three, too many,” says Scooter, as he pushes another in front of me. I pass. I am supposed to drive this next section, but I buckle into the back seat with new admiration for the Basques of Nevada.

We glide along like a boat, as if the road is a river, and veer down State Route 376, then down an unpaved spur to the hamlet of Kingston. We park at Zach’s Lucky Spur, a shack of saloon in the shadow of a giant windmill, the only watering hole in a town of about 70 folks. Men’s Health magazine cited it as the “Best Bar in the Middle of Nowhere.” In Nevada, it seems, there is an inverse relationship between the emptiness of the landscape and the quantity of objects inside shops, hotels and bars.

Mike Zacharias, the owner, has packed the place with ludic collections, cowboy photos and art, including over 100 spurs, and Rory Calhoun’s vest, which he is sporting as he sips and spins tales. There’s a fantastic story behind every ornament and picture, and it’s easy to believe them all. At one point Zach says “I used to ship bulls for a living…shipped them all over the world. At one time I was the biggest bull-shipper in the world.” I do believe the man.

We’re at about 6,000’ elevation, and after a couple of Icky IPAs (named after Nevada’s official state fossil, the Ichthyosaur) I wobble a few yards down the hill to Miles End B&B (owned by John and Ann Miles, and their dog Zee), a fetching wilderness retreat with a stone lodge (called “Valhalla”), a patch of grass (first green I’ve touched in days), and a wood-burning barrel hot tub, where I soak for a spell under a sky plush with a million points of light. Putting my head back against the oak rim, I feel like I’m falling upwards.