Carlin Canyon

The Humboldt River cut this canyon, and everyone who crossed Nevada followed it through. In December 1828 Peter Skene Ogden's Hudson's Bay Company brigade became the first whites to enter the gorge—one of his trappers, Joseph Paul, died and was buried nearby. Emigrants threaded the defile they called Wall Canyon from 1841 on; the Donner Party passed through in 1846. The Central Pacific's Chinese crews laid track here in 1868, and later the highway and Interstate 80 followed. Carlin Canyon, a few miles east of Carlin, has funneled trapper, wagon, rail, and freeway in turn.

What the plaque says

In December 1828, Peter Skene Ogden and his trapping brigade (Hudson's Bay Company's Fifth Snake Country Expedition) were the first European Americans to enter here. Joseph Paul, one of Ogden's trappers, died nearby - the first white man to die and be buried in the Humboldt country. Late in 1845, John Fremont dispatched a group down the Humboldt. They traversed this canyon with difficulty on November 10. In September 1846, the Reed-Donner Party, en route to disaster in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada, viewed the canyon. The Central Pacific's Chinese track gangs constructed the transcontinental railroad (now Southern Pacific) through here in December, 1868. Subsequently, the canyon became known as Carlin or Moleen Canyon. The Western Pacific, second transcontinental rail link across Nevada, was constructed in 1907. In 1913, Nevada Route 1, the first auto road, took over the abandoned Central Pacific grade through the canyon. In 1920, Route 1 became the Victory Highway, and in 1926, U.S. Highway 40. In its freeway phase, it is now designated Interstate 80.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carlin & the Carlin Trend — 4.4 mi
  The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 6.4 mi
  A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.
• Elko — 15 mi
  The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.

More markers nearby

• Carlin — 5.3 mi
• West End of Hastings Cutoff — 5.9 mi
• Palisade — 12 mi
• Oil From Shale — 14 mi