| After
enjoying a wonderful life in the gambling town of Ely,
Nevada, Peter Thody pushes wife Carole's patience to the
limit on a spur-of-the-moment and probably ill-advised
eight-mile dirt road adventure. Join them as they follow
the Nevada section of U.S. Route 6, America's second longest
highway. |
A few hundred yards west of the town of Garrison,
Utah, State Highway 21 turns into Nevada Highway 487 and we
enter the eighth and penultimate state of our month-long drive
from Chicago to San Francisco.
This is desert country, the last place on earth
you'd expect to come across streams, lakes and an abundance
of wildlife. But within minutes of arriving in Nevada we're
greeted by signs directing us towards Great
Basin National Park, home to pronghorns, deer, coyotes,
eagles, the 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak and a grove of 4,000-year-old
bristlecone pines, believed to be among the world's oldest
living organisms.
Its remoteness makes Great Basin one of the least-visited
parks in America - there can't be many people who find themselves
"just passing by" - so we drive up to the entrance
to see whether there's a through road to Ely, our destination
that evening. Frustratingly, there isn't, so we're forced
to make do with a fleeting glimpse from the outside. However,
the drive up to the park entrance does give us the opportunity
to ponder the artistic merit of a number of frankly weird
sculptures that line the road, including the rusty skeleton
of a car being "driven" by the very real skeleton
of a long-dead horse.
Ely's isolated position - 100 miles of desert
to the east, more than twice that to the west - has persuaded
us to call ahead and book a room at the historic, six-storey Hotel
Nevada and Gambling Hall, the state's tallest building
until well into the 1940s. Actually, after checking the room
rates, we've treated ourselves and splashed out on a suite,
which we got for the princely sum of $61.05, including tax.
When you're paying so little, there's always the risk that
the hotel may not be worth any more. But to our delight, not
only is our room perfectly clean and comfortable, but it's
actually the Jimmy Stewart Suite, complete with themed movie
posters and suchlike. It really is a wonderful life.
After getting to grips with the vagaries of the
plumbing (OK, not everything's perfect), we make our way back
downstairs, past the obligatory collection of stuffed bears,
wolves and moose, and order a couple of drinks. The entire
ground floor of the hotel is given up to slot machines, beer
and cheap food, so we go with the flow and slide a dollar
bill into a one-armed bandit. Another four dollars later we
win a $1 silver token stamped with the hotel's name. Deciding
that this a fair price for such a quality souvenir, we walk
away happy.
If we're left in any doubt as to Ely's desire
to extract as much of our hard-earned cash as possible, the
uncertainty evaporates at Mr. G's Villa pizza restaurant across
the road, where our bill includes the words: "For Your
Convenience You May Use This Optional Tip Calculator"
and then lists our choices. All it was lacking was a description
of each option: 10%: Seriously? Get real. Are You Naturally
Mean Or Just English? 15%: C'mon. You Want My Kids to Starve?
20%: OK. That's More Like It. 25%: Thanks. You Can Come Again.
Ely is a mining town that, like many others,
has experienced its ups and downs. At one point it was home
to the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, and it was
to provide access to those valuable deposits that the Nevada
Northern Railway was built. Today, the railroad and old locos
form part of a railroad
museum - run mainly by volunteers - that in 2008 tied
with Lake Tahoe for the title "Nevada's Favorite Attraction."
When the copper market collapsed in the 1970s, the mines closed
and the industry survived by turning its hand to the extraction
of gold by means of the environmentally unfriendly-sounding
process of "cyanide leaching". Since then, copper
mining has resumed twice, once in 1999 and again in 2004,
but these days the ore is hauled by truck.
Even if, like us, you're not into either gambling
or old steam trains, Ely is still a quaint and interesting
town, full of friendly people and marvellous old buildings
and blessed with the wonderful light of the desert sun. You're
unlikely to make a special detour to visit the place, but
if you're passing through, you'll be made very welcome. [Editor's
Note: Ely is one of our favourite towns in Nevada, home to
an extraordinarily good restaurant, for more tips check
out this article.]
The next day is The Big One: 260 miles of rocky
desert between us and California.
Our original plan was to follow U.S. Highway
50, the self-styled "Loneliest
Road in America." But we'd been told that U.S.
Route 6 - the Grand Army of the Republic Highway - was
even emptier. So off we set.
And, my word, it's hard to imagine a lonelier
road. Occasionally the scrubland turns slightly craggier but
for the main part, the Nevada section of America's longest
highway (3,652 miles from Provincetown, Mass., to Long Beach,
Calif.) makes its way through a stony, wind-swept desert with
only the occasional sun-bleached skeleton for company. Two
months after we completed this drive, adventurer Steve Fossett
failed to return from a flight over the Nevada desert and
(at the time of this writing) has yet to be found. Had I not
made this drive, I wouldn't have believed this to be possible
in modern-day America.
If you stick to the main highway, of course,
you're pretty safe. Other cars may be few and far between
but you're not going to be stuck without help for long. Turn
off the paved road though and it gets a bit more serious.
So when I take the unilateral decision to hit a dirt track
75 miles east of Tanopah and explore the Lunar
Crater National Natural Landmark, I can sense that, had
she been consulted, my wife Carole might not have lent her
full support to this unplanned detour. And as the few hundred
yards I'd envisaged driving turn into a five or six miles,
and as the condition of the track suggests I should soon consider
making use of the low ratio gearbox, I too begin to question
the wisdom of this decision. It would certainly be a very
long, very hot and, I suspect, very tense walk back to the
main highway were we to break down.
But no, deciding that admitting any doubt would
only make my wife more nervous (aren't we men brilliant?),
I drive onwards and upwards, through the ash hills and past
the cinder cones and lava outcrops. After all, if it wasn't
100 percent safe, there wouldn't be a sign pointing this way,
would there?
As it happens, after eight miles we do arrive
at the foot of the 430-foot-deep Lunar Crater. For a brief
moment I consider walking up to the rim to peer over the edge
but the heat outside, not to mention the atmosphere inside
the car, suggest that this particular adventure has probably
run its course. So we turn around and make our way back to
the relative safety of Route 6.
The solitary refuelling point on today's drive
is Tonopah,
once one of the richest silver-mining towns in the West. Today
its survival owes much to the tourist dollar but the discarded
mining equipment and rusting trucks that litter the town give
it a gritty authenticity. [Editor's Note: Tonopah hosts one
of the finest
mining museums in the west, and there are still a number
of active mines in the area. In addition, a variety of top-secret
military installations within a few miles of the city bolster
the local economy. Goldfield, just south of Tonopah, was once
the home of Wyatt and Virgil Earp and interest in the historic
mining towns continue to attract thousands of visitors each
year.]
Fuel and water replenished, we begin the final
leg of our drive across Nevada: 80 odd miles of desert which,
if anything, is even rockier and harsher-looking.
There were times before we reached Nevada when
we'd look at the map and wonder at the sense of going some
distance out of our way simply to drive across a desert. I
am so glad we did. Next time though, I will get to see inside
the Lunar Crater. And then I'll go back to Ely to collect
Carole.
Peter Thody
8/22/08
