Traveling back and forth between Colorado and California, it has been my privilege to drive across the state of Nevada a number of times recently. Usually I take I-80. This Interstate runs from Reno on the western edge of the Silver State to Wendover on the east, which is the last outpost of legal gambling and prostitution before you hit straight-laced Utah. It’s also where the mountains give way to the Bonneville Salt Flats. But today I came across a piece in National Geographic about an alternative route, U.S. 50:
Where the state of Nevada folds in half—from the elbow on its western arm at Lake Tahoe across to its Utah border—you’ll find the most direct route across the state. It crosses several communities, a handful of mountain ranges, a national park, and one reservoir, where bobcats, foxes, and wild horses roam free. There’s life, yes, but not a familiar way of life for many. It’s a place where the lines between John Wayne Westerns and everyday life blur, where ghost towns bleed into living ones. This is Route 50, the Loneliest Road in America.
I must say, it sure sounds familiar. That’s probably because each town on the Interstate (Reno-Winnemucca-Elko-Wendover) has its corresponding twin on U.S. 50 (Tahoe-Austin-Ely-Baker). Nowadays a lot more traffic passes through the towns on I-80 than on U.S. 50, but it wasn’t always so:
Before it was known as the Loneliest Road in America, Route 50 was anything but. In the 1850s, the Gold Rush sparked a caravan of wagons to head West along the thruway. According to the Highway 50 Association, the Roaring Road (as it was called) became so congested at times that hopeful miners and their families would have to wait days before they could access it — a Panama Canal of sorts, standing between the new frontier and the old.
********
Last word goes to Danish photographer Mathias Svold, whose photos accompany the U.S. 50 article. You just can’t have a National Geographic piece without at least one shot of the natives in situ…
Loneliness has its advantages – at least with no photographers around.
I rather enjoyed taking 50 across Nevada when the kids were little. At the time, Austin was pushing itself as a MB mecca.