A Journey in Geological Time

At the end of the canyon the road enters highway 50. This coast-to-coast route traverses the width of the state from the capital on its western edge in Carson City, east to Baker on the Utah border. In Nevada it is proudly trumpeted as "The Loneliest Road in America" thanks to a 1986 Life Magazine article which described the lack of facilities along a 287 mile stretch. As a marketing concept, this must rank up there with the Volkswagen ads proclaiming the beetle “ugly.” But considering that Nevada’s most plentiful commodity is our vast, unpopulated, open spaces, we have to be creative in our tourism image-making. Another state route is officially signposted as the “Extraterrestrial Highway,” but that’s another story.

On our first serious excursion collecting hot ponds, we spent President’s Weekend in the center of the state. We started by driving south from Reno, up the Geiger Grade to historic Virginia City. There we took a scenic shortcut to US highway 50 through Six Mile Canyon, where in 1857 the first gold strike of the Comstock Lode was made. Near the eastern end of the canyon we noticed a herd of wild horses on a hillside. I approached them carefully, making pictures at each step, sure that they would bolt before I could get very close. But these creatures, eking out an existence amid the sagebrush and scrub, allowed me to get within 50 feet of them before they began to shy away. Periodically the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) helicopters swoop in to corral some of them to keep their fragile ecology in balance. They are relocated to holding facilities where they are offered up for adoption. I found these noble artifacts of the old west exciting to photograph, but probably not well suited to life in a condo.

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At the end of the canyon the road enters highway 50. This coast-to-coast route traverses the width of the state from the capital on its western edge in Carson City, east to Baker on the Utah border. In Nevada it is proudly trumpeted as "The Loneliest Road in America" thanks to a 1986 Life Magazine article which described the lack of facilities along a 287 mile stretch. As a marketing concept, this must rank up there with the Volkswagen ads proclaiming the beetle “ugly.” But considering that Nevada’s most plentiful commodity is our vast, unpopulated, open spaces, we have to be creative in our tourism image-making. Another state route is officially signposted as the “Extraterrestrial Highway,” but that’s another story.
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