The Loneliest Road in America
“No services next 81 miles,” the road sign warned. “No exits, no water, little human life” it could have continued.
In early August, Tony and I packed our Subaru, said goodbye to the Rogue Valley, and headed out on a 1,400-mile road trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we were joining our Brooklyn and Denver-based families and grandkids for a week-long rendezvous.
A veteran of more cross-country trips than I can count, I’d chosen a route that led us due east across Nevada and Utah on what’s been nicknamed the “Loneliest Road in America,” Highway 50.
Leaving behind the wildfires ravaging northeastern California and the slot machines lighting Reno, we joined Highway 50 five hours into our trip and entered a world of sand, rocks, chaparral, mountains, salt licks, and grazing land as far as the eye could see.
I was reminded by a quote from novelist Lawrence Durrell: “All landscapes ask the same question in a whisper. ‘I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me?’”
And I had a new appreciation for the phrase “Big Sky”: the march of fair weather cumulus against a blue sky, the flash of lighting piercing a cloak of dark clouds, a sea of sagebrush merging with a cloudless sky.
By the end of the afternoon, we’d climbed four of the 17 mountain passes that dot Highway 50’s 400-mile traverse of Nevada and sped across more than a dozen straight stretches of road that brought infinity to life. Every once and awhile, we came upon a gravel turnoff with a sign pointing towards seeming oblivion, like the one to “Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, 48 mi.” (The park, I later earned, was home to the most abundant concentration, and largest known remains, of Ichthyosaurs, an ancient marine reptile that swam in a warm ocean that covered central Nevada 225 million years ago.)
For the next two days, these were our high altitude companions.
Once the backbone of America
Following pathways left by Native Americans two hundred years ago, Highway 50 became the first transcontinental highway in the United States in 1913, spanning 3,000 miles from New York to California and passing through hundreds of small old towns on its coast-to-coast journey. About Highway 50, Blue Highways author and master travel writer William Least Heat-Moon wrote, “for the unhurried, this little-known highway is the best national road across the middle of the United States.” In July 1997, Time magazine devoted nearly an entire issue to telling the story of the road it called the “Backbone of America.”
A few hours before sunset, Tony and I pulled into The Cozy Mountain Motel in Austin, Nevada, an unincorporated settlement on the western slopes of the Toiyabe Range and our first town on Highway 50.
Billed as a “ghost town,” the Austin area was originally occupied by bands of the Western Shoshone people. During the Civil War, newcomers—a.k.a. European settlers–discovered enough silver in deposits around Austin to support the war effort. By the summer of 1863, Austin had a population of more than 10,000, mostly European Americans attracted to the silver boom. In 1864, the town launched an impromptu fundraising drive that raised over $250,000 for wounded Civil War veterans, by repeatedly auctioning a sack of flour.
Like mining towns across the West, Austin’s boom turned bust. By 1870, the population had shrunk to 1,324. Today it numbers 167.
We joined locals and tourists at Grandma’s, one of Austin’s two remaining restaurants, where I spied three women around my age with laptops, engaged in some sort of planning.
“What are you ladies up to?” I asked. Emma perked right up. “We’re organizing monthly gatherings where townsfolk can share their talents and gab,” she said. She showed me the flyer they’d created with Photoshop. “Wanna come?”
“There are more creatives here in Austin than you might think,” Louise added with a grin.
Eureka
With two roosters and a mob of chickens announcing morning outside our room at the Cozy Mountain Motel, Tony and I resumed on Highway 50.
The landscape continued breathtaking, the road devoid of services and human life. The high elevation, ranging generally between six and seven thousand feet, mitigated the sun’s heat. The mountain passes mounted—Woodpeckers Peak, Buster Mountain, Moorman Ridge and more—and Western Juniper and sagebrush continued to line the long, straight stretches of road.
One hundred and forty seven miles later, we entered Eureka. Settled in 1864 by a group of silver prospectors from nearby Austin, who discovered rock containing a silver-lead ore on nearby Prospect Peak, the town became Nevada’s second-richest mineral producer, behind western Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Two of the largest concerns in Eureka were the Richmond Mining Company and the Eureka Mining Company. These two companies often collided, and in one instance, their litigation reached the U.S Supreme Court. Like Austin, boom gave way to bust, with the population peaking at 10,000 in 1878 and five years later landing at a little over 1,000 and now 480.
We peeked inside the 300-seat Eureka Opera House, built in 1880 and restored in 1993, where dances, operas, and masquerade balls once made it one of the most popular “entertainment halls” in Nevada.
A nineteenth-century Fed Ex
At the Eureka Public Library we learned more about the legendary Pony Express, for which we had seen recurring historic markers since we joined Highway 50. The markers, it turns out, coincided with stations (rudimentary structures) along the Pony Express Route where riders could stop and rest, change horses, or even settle into for the night. By using mounted riders rather than traditional stagecoaches, Pony Express’s founders had proposed to establish a fast mail service between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, with letters delivered in 10 days, which many said was impossible.
It was a colorful, if not daring, scheme. To meet its guarantee of 10-day delivery of mail (letters and newspapers only) from St. Joseph to San Francisco, the company required its horses to be ridden at top speed, making it necessary to switch out horses every 20 miles or so, depending on the terrain. For riders, the company sought young men born to the saddle, undaunted by danger, and generally slight of build so as to minimize the strain on their mounts. Both horses and riders (the best known being William “Buffalo Bill” Cody) came at a price—typically $200 per horse and $125 a month for riders.
When it started in 1860, the delivery price for mail was set at $5 per 1⁄2 ounce (14 g) but dropped to $1 a year later; the price of “normal” delivery at the time was two cents.
The founders of the Pony Express hoped to win an exclusive government mail contract but 18 months later, this 19th century Federal Express had ceased operation, unable to meet its expenses and short on customers.
The final stretch of Highway 50 through Nevada led us to a third town, Ely, another 75 miles through landscapes both grand and barren. Here, the discovery of copper in 1906 created a mining boom, later than the towns of Austin and Eureka, but no less fragile.
After Ely, we crossed into Utah. We entered the Great Basin Desert, crossing the Confusion Range via King’s Canyon and House Range via Skull Rock Pass. When the road straightened out again, we came upon a familiar sign: “No services next 100 miles.”
Five hours later we pulled into Moab, Utah, home to Arches National Park and Canyonlands, and the end of our journey on Highway 50.
The public domain
I sympathize with (former) city dwellers like I who first thought that the BLM signs that are omnipresent across the West were related to Black Lives Matter, however fantastical.
A trip across Nevada’s remote spaces underscores the importance and reach of our nation’s Bureau of Land Management. In Nevada, 70 percent of the land falls under the BLM.
With historical roots dating back to the earliest days of the nation, the BLM administers the lands that remain from America’s original “public domain.” Created in 1946 through a government reorganization during the Truman Administration, the BLM is the successor to the General Land Office (established in 1812) and the U.S. Grazing Service (originally called the Division of Grazing and renamed in 1939).
As the manager of more land (245 million surface acres or one-tenth of America’s land base) and more subsurface mineral estate (700 million acres) than any other government agency, the BLM carries out a dual mandate: that of managing public land for multiple uses (such as energy development, livestock grazing, mining, timber harvesting, and outdoor recreation) while conserving natural, historical, and cultural resources (such as wilderness areas, wild horse and wildlife habitat, artifacts, and dinosaur fossils).
One of the mysteries occupying Tony and me along Highway 50 were the omnipresent road signs warning of cattle crossing. We saw none, finding it hard to imagine what the cattle would eat and who would mind them, with nary a human or built structure in sight—until we finally came across a large black bovine, standing right in front of a cattle crossing sign waiting for “traffic” to pass. Perhaps it was a mirage, Tony and I wondered.
I have learned since that grazing permits, however unused, have preserved the sanctity of these lands for decades.
In these days when our planet fights for life, the silence and spaciousness of the loneliest road across America rises as a blessing.
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