Lamoille Valley

Tucked against the Ruby Mountains, Lamoille Valley is the green exception to Nevada's dry reputation. The first settlers took up ranching here in 1864, the year Nevada became a state, drawn by the well-watered meadows below the Rubies' steep granite peaks—a setting so unlike the surrounding desert that it earned the nickname "Nevada's Switzerland." Generations of ranching families have worked the valley since, and it remains a pastoral pocket of hayfields and cattle beneath the mountains. Nearby Lamoille Canyon, carved by glaciers into the Ruby Mountains, draws visitors to what many call the most beautiful corner of the state.

What the plaque says

Because heavy use denuded the grass from the main Fort Hall route of the California Emigrant Trail along the Humboldt River, many Emigrants left the river near Starr Valley. They skirted the East Humboldt Range and the Ruby Mountains along a Shoshone Indian path, rested their livestock in the Lamoille Valley, and returned to the Humboldt River. John Walker and Thomas Waterman first settled the area in 1865: Waterman named the valley after his native Vermont. In 1868, Walker erected the Cottonwood Hotel, store and blacksmith shop in the valley, and the settlement became known as the "Crossroads". Here wagons were repaired and food and supplies could be obtained. The original buildings, and the more recent 20-bedroom Lamoille Hotel, creamery, flour mill, and dance hall are gone.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains — 9.5 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.
• Elko — 16 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.
• Ruby Valley & Newe Sogobia — 19 mi
  The valley where the Western Shoshone signed an 1863 treaty that ceded no land — and the heart of Newe Sogobia, a homeland the Newe say was never for sale.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Halleck Site 1867- 1886 — 16 mi
• Ruby Valley Pony Express Station — 16 mi
• Elko — 16 mi
• Oil From Shale — 17 mi