Today is the big day, the one I’ve been waiting for. The day I drive “the loneliest road in America”, the stretch of U.S. Highway 50 that crosses northern Nevada. Ironically, this wasn’t a planned part of the trip. I just needed to get from Ely in the east to Carson City in the west, and Highway 50 is the most direct route. It wasn’t until I was making hotel reservations that I realized this was the so-called “loneliest road”. Once that bit of knowledge infested my brain, this day ceased to be a dreaded five-hour drive across the featureless desert and became a Grand Adventure!
Any time I undertake a drive of such length, I want to be sure I am well rested. So last night, I took a dose of Lorazepam at bedtime, as I hadn’t been sleeping well the previous couple nights. This worked. I got nine hours of solid sleep. In the morning, I stocked the rental car with Mountain Dew and some pick-a-nick food, and I hit the road!
It wasn’t long before I noticed some repetition in the scenery. This portion of Nevada has several parallel mountain ranges, and each range is separated from the next by a low, flat, wide desert plain. The drive is basically this:
- Drive 30 or 40 miles in a straight line at high speed.
- Drive 5 or 10 miles of winding road to climb a mountain range.
- Drive 5 or 10 miles of curvaceous road to descend the other side.
- Repeat ad nauseum.
Need some visuals to go with that description? Well then, here are a few pics I took on the first leg…
I was unable to find any “official” map of “the loneliest road”, so when I say that the above are pictures from the “first leg”, I mean the stretch of road that I unilaterally named the first leg. That would be the drive from Ely to the town of Eureka, Nevada – a distance of 77 miles. No other towns are found on the first leg. Once I got outside Ely’s mining district, I didn’t see any towns, businesses, farms, or ranch houses for over SEVENTY MILES. And that, folks, is why it’s called “the loneliest road”. I stopped in at a local cafe in Eureka, had an average burger for lunch, then set out to get a few pictures in town…
All right, now get back in the car. We don’t have all day, DAMMIT! It’s time for the second leg – the 69-mile stretch from Eureka to Austin, Nevada…
As we head uphill on the mountain range that hosts Austin (on our “downhill” side), we see a sign pointing the way to Hickison Petroglyphs Recreation Area, and decide to stop and check it out. The kiosk shows a map of a 0.6-mile round-trip trail, so let’s check it out:
Sadly, there’s next to nothing in the way of petroglyphs; it appears they’ve all been chipped away by modern morons. Let’s get back on the road, shall we? Looking around Austin as we pass through, I see nothing that grabs my attention as a reason to stop and or photograph the place. So, we continue to the third leg of today’s journey: the 111-mile stretch from Austin to Fallon…
Once we hit Fallon (yes, I ran over Jimmy Fallon), we are back in civilization! The fourth and final leg is 63 miles of non-lonely highway to a hotel in Carson City. No further photographin’ today.
Final Thoughts on “the loneliest road in America”:
Using my unilaterally decided criteria, this road goes 258 miles with only two small towns along the way. The spaces been the towns are just that: space! No farms, no ranch houses. Just a Hell of a lot of NOTHING. However, the road really isn’t all that lonely. It may be true that nobody lives out here, but there are people driving out here. I’d guesstimate I saw about 3 or 4 cars per mile driving the other direction. The longest I went without encountering other vehicles was probably 5 to 10 miles. Still, if your car breaks down out here, I imagine it could take a very long time for a tow truck to arrive. If that were to happen in summer, you’d better have plenty of sunblock, water, and picnic supplies in the car. And bringing some shade umbrellas wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Next up: a few photograph-free days, then I check out the towns of the Comstock Lode.
Voyages with Parkinson's 