Elko Airport

Elko helped invent commercial aviation in America. The town built an airfield in 1920 as a stop on the first transcontinental airmail route between San Francisco and Salt Lake City, putting it on the aerial map almost as early as the railroad had. The milestone came on April 6, 1926, when the first contract airmail flight in the United States—Airmail Route Number 5 from Pasco, Washington—landed here, inaugurating the private airline system that became American commercial flight. A railroad town and cowtown had become an aviation pioneer. Elko Regional Airport carries on where those first mail planes touched down.

What the plaque says

Terminus of the First Commercial Air Mail Route. On April 6, 1926, Varney Air Lines pilot Leon Cuddeback, carrying one bag of mail, landed his tiny Curtis Swallow bi-plane at Elko, Nevada, completing the first scheduled air mail run in the United States. The single engine, 90-horsepower aircraft had taken off from Pasco, Washington, stopped at Boise, Idaho, for fuel and mail, then completed the 460-mile flight to Elko. The Varney contract was awarded October 27, 1925, at a rate of eights cents an ounce. Varney sold to Boeing, which merged with United Air Lines in 1931.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elko — 0.9 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.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 8.0 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.
• Carlin & the Carlin Trend — 19 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.
• Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains — 27 mi
  The great exception to Nevada's sagebrush monotony — a glacier-carved canyon and a wall of eleven-thousand-foot granite peaks an hour southeast of Elko, fairly called the state's Alps.

More markers nearby

• Oil From Shale — 0.2 mi
• Elko — 1.6 mi
• Ruby Valley Pony Express Station — 1.7 mi
• West End of Hastings Cutoff — 8.5 mi