Canyons, cabins and cowboys
Highway-hopping through Northern Nevada’s Ruby Mountains leads to ghostly deserts, forgotten graves, and mountain yurts.
Adult nerves begin to replace my childlike excitement. For the past three hours, I’ve been in the safe company of my hire car’s GPS. But my eloquent American-accented friend suddenly ghosts me. I halt. I’m deep in a featureless desert, now out of range, looking for the seldom-visited Seven Troughs Ghost Town.
I’ve taken the one-hour dirt road detour from Lovelock, off Nevada’s epic 400-mile Cowboy Corridor (Interstate-80, better known as the I-80) that connects Reno to West Wendover.
A handsome herd of burros – wild donkeys – arrive, stall and stare. “Do I turn back?” I ask them. They too ghost me. I motor on, squinting at timber blobs dancing in the distant heat haze – some, now, incalculable miles ahead of me.
Forgotten ghost towns
Relief arrives when the blurred blobs take shape, as if corrected pottery on the horizon’s wheel. Reaching the wind-dusted sagebrush-tufted ghost town, in prime rattlesnake country, I open my car’s oven door to a furnace of desert air, already parched by the fierce May sun.
Remnant ore bins, a stamp mill, a rusted sign branded with Joshua Hendy Machine Works, and bullet-pocked miner cabins filled with shattered pieces of the past are all that remain of this early 1900s boomtown. The town raked in its gold riches until World War I, and devastating floods that sealed the decline of the canyon’s several camps.
Listening intently to the stifling silence fills me with questions. Why did people settle out here? How did they survive the harsh conditions? I recall some well-versed words of 19th-century explorer and author, Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Whether travelling for pleasure or seeking prosperity, travel ignites the adventurer. In fact, travelling Twain also dabbled at prospecting near here. I return to the Cowboy Corridor, bound for the town where his ghost may well reside.
Living ghost towns
Back in Lovelock, I grab some groceries and head north-east. Diverting from the highway along Lovelock-Unionville Road, I wind across the summit between Lone Mountain and Gold Mountain, before descending towards Buena Vista Valley.
At the foothills of the Humboldt Range, I reach Unionville, where few have roamed since its 1860s mining heyday. Here, I take respite at 1861-built Old Pioneer Garden Country Inn.
I enjoy a simple supper in the country kitchen bedecked with a vintage James Graham Manufacturing Wedgewood stove, rare delph and other paraphernalia from the past. A windstorm arrives and continues into the night.
Alone in the large country mansion, wild wind rattles the weathered windows. The Shining springs to mind. But I’m unperturbed, safely ensconced in the sitting room storied with historic tomes. Walls and dressers are draped with rare accoutrements, and black and white family portraits facing a grandfather clock.
Waking to a calm day and beneath a mackerel sky, I head up the road to find a dilapidated mining cabin. It’s widely documented to be the one that Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) built in 1861, as mentioned in his 1872-penned Roughing it. But some locals now challenge that. What’s certain is there is no sign of his ghost here, so I head to a confirmed historic landmark.
Unionville Cemetery reveals the sparse weatherbeaten graves of the town’s pioneers. Their headstones lay faded. Today, they are creepily trampled across by armies of giant Mormon crickets – a sight that may well have inspired Hitchcock, had he also joined me today.
Cowboy country
An hour north-east at Winnemucca is the Buckaroo Hall of Fame & Heritage Museum. It’s dedicated to preserving the culture and heritage of the Great Basin’s 19th and 20th century buckaroos with their lassoes. Inductees are revered through a priceless photographic display of ranch life.
A couple of hours’ drive east, I arrive at Elko, the true heart of Nevada’s cowboy country. Beneath a horse sculpture cantilevered from its roof, I head into family-owned and operated J.M. Capriola Company, who have been deftly hewing authentic western gear for generations.
In the upstairs workshop, skilled craftsmen custom-make saddles, which are intricately hand-engraved and painted. Downstairs is a world of belts, chaps, cowboy hats and boots. I leave well heeled, but $349 poorer.
Mountain yurts
A drive into Lamoille Valley ascends me to 7000 feet in the snow-kissed Ruby Mountains. A covert dirt road through an aspen grove leads to what is possibly one of Nevada’s most intimate off-grid stays. Stepping into the circular cocoon, Conrad Creek Yurt wraps its latticed arms around two queen beds, a leather sofa and kitchenette.
Hammock-swaying by the firepit above the tumbling creek, time slows. And when sundown beckons my bedtime, on goes the propane-fuelled fireplace, down go the solar lights, and up go my eyes, gazing through the domed skylight at the Silver State’s sparkling stars.
Nevada is wildly eclectic and enticingly magnetic, where the past comes handstitched to the present.