The Loneliest Road in America

Forgive me, gentle reader, for falling behind again in my blog. I hope you didn't think the Nevada desert swallowed me up. It didn't. I'm safe and sound in Tahoe, and I'll fill you in on today's driving (Tahoe to Frisco back to Tahoe) tomorrow, I hope. First, follow me along "The Loneliest Road in America," won't you?

U.S. 50 in Nevada got the "Loneliest Road" title in 1986 when Life magazine did a pictorial/article on it, and the Nevada tourism commission quickly jumped on the opportunities that presented. Today you can pick up "The Official Highway 50 Survival Guide" in several towns along the route. It is really just a pamplet that kind of looks like a passport. It doesn't really have any tips on how to stay alive; instead it contains bits of information about the settlements along the way. As you drive through, you can get your book stamped in post offices and general stores in Austin, Ely, Eureka, Fallon, and Fernley. Send in a passport with all the stamps, and Nevada will return to you an official "I Survived Highway 50" certificate. I got the guide, didn't bother to get stamps, and I'll go without the certificate of survival; you'll just have to take my word for it.

The guide opens with a quote from that fateful July 1986 article. It reads: "'It's totally empty,' says an AAA counselor. 'There are no points of interest. We don't recommend it.' The 287-mile stretch of U.S. 50 running from Ely to Fernley, Nev., passes nine towns, two abandoned mining camps, a few gas pumps and the occasional coyote. 'We warn all motorists not to drive there,' says the AAA rep, 'unless they're confident of their survival skills.'" Pretty ominious stuff.

Allow me to very humbly disagree with the AAA counselor: U.S. 50 is one of the two or three most amazing and magnificent roads I've ever traveled, and I encourage everybody to someday give it a go. Sure, I was a bit nervous at first, but nerves settled into relaxed comfort fairly quickly, and comfort schmooved into wonder and bliss. This drive was incredible, and if I had to abandon the rest of the trip tomorrow and fly home, my day in the desert would make it okay.

First, it is indeed a unbelievably lonely road. For me, the drive really began shortly after I got off of I-15 in and toodled through the little town of Delta, Utah. From there to Ely, a distance of 147 miles, there are no towns, no homes, no farms, no nothing but paved U.S. 50 and a couple of dusty roads heading off into nothingness. There are, however, other cars driving 50. In fact, while there are plenty of times when you can't see another person or automobile anywhere in any direction, you don't need to wait for more than five or ten minutes for somebody to speed past at 75 miles per hour. I know because I got out a few times to marvel, to take pictures, and to pee, and before long I'd see somebody approaching.

Anyway, the Utah part of the drive was actually more desperate looking than anything in Nevada. The vegetation was more sparse, and the dried lake beds more numerous. The Nevada portion was much better, however.

The heart of Nevada is traversed by several north-south mountain ranges, some with peaks high enough to be dappled with snow fields. (Speaking of snow, by the way, none of the highway was as hot as I had expected. I'd guess the temperature got to someplace in the low nineties, but with the elevation—most of the road is around a mile above sea level, I think, and the highest pass was about 7500 feet—and the wind, it didn't feel like the oven I expected. I think that kind of heat is in the southern part of the state, around Death Valley and Las Vegas. I guess I'll find out in a couple of days.) The highway takes you through a series of mountain pass to desert basin to mountain pass to desert basin cycles. Man, it was so fantastic!

What about the towns? Ely, the semi-official eastern terminus, came first. I was down about a third a tank of gas, so I refilled and then headed into town. William Least Heat-Moon, the author of the classic travel journal Blue Highays, went through Ely in the late 1970s and stopped in at the Hotel Nevada, so I decided to follow. He overheard a conversation about the costs of prostitutes in Ely, but I didn't. He said whorehouses abounded in Ely, but I didn't see any. I did see a "Walk of Stars" on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Nevada, a list of the famous who had either dropped by or spent the night. The names included Mickey Rooney, Pat Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Stewart, and Stephen King; William Least Heat-Moon didn't get a star. I asked the woman at the check-in desk about that omission, and she didn't know who I was talking about.

The next town, Eureka, was my favorite of the day. It best maintained the old feel that conjures images of when fortunes were determined by the success of the local mines and when Highway 50 was nothing but a stagecoach and Pony Express route. I picked up an apple, some beef jerky, a loaf of bread, and a tube of sunscreen—the sun was cooking my left arm—snapped some pictures and moved on.

More basins, more mountain passes, and in the distance a dried up lake being whipped into a great white cloud by the very strong and steady wind. The scenery never really changed, but I didn't grow tired of it either.

Austin, Nevada clings to the western side of the Toiyabe Mountains, one of the tallest and steepest ranges along the route. Least Heat-Moon called it "a living ghost town" and predicted that it would in very short order wither and die thanks to I-80 to the north sucking all the traffic away from U.S. 50. Today Austin appeared, if not prosperous, at least healthy. It seems to have become the seat of outdoor adventure, with many people biking, hiking, and camping in nearby Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. I stopped at a local park to cook up some hot dogs for lunch, then topped off the gas tank again.

Eighty or ninety miles past Austin, I came across Sand Mountain, which was pretty much what its name indicates. I don't think these photos do it justice, but it was an enormously wide and tall pile of soft white sand. Families hole up here for a week at a time to ride their ATVs up, down, and around the gigantic dune. In these photos, the camper in the foreground throws off the scale (I intended for the opposite) and makes the mountain look smaller, but maybe the speck that is an ATVer in the closeup picture gives a better sense of perspective. That guy is about a quarter of the way down the dune.

After another twenty-five miles, the desert jarringly turns into Ohio or Indiana, if you ignore the mountains in the distance. Fallon, Nevada is an agricultural town that is most famous for growing Heart of Gold cantaloupes. Highway 50 is suddenly brought back to the modern world, lined with shopping plazas and fast food joints. Here the Lonelist Road loses its distinctive character and becomes just another highway. I drove on through Silver Springs, Dayton, and Carson City before climbing up to Lake Tahoe. Looking behind me, a brown haze reminiscent of Los Angeles or Athens hovered above the valley. It was a depressing image to be left with after such a magnificent drive.

The alpine beauty of Lake Tahoe is well known, but it is especially dramatic when just an hour before you felt like you were driving across Mars. I rounded the north end of the lake and crossed into California, my last border before getting to the Pacific Ocean. Twenty minutes into California, I pulled into the house my Auntie Em got for us all and gave hugs to anybody interested.