Old Geiger Grade

Before the highway, this was the way down the mountain. The Geiger Grade was cut as a toll road in 1862, climbing the steep ground between the Comstock and the Truckee Meadows below, and for decades it carried the people and freight the boomtown depended on. When Virginia City burned in 1875, refugees streamed up this road with whatever they could drag, and camped along it in the hills. It stayed in use until 1936, when a modern highway replaced it. The old grade survives as a narrow, twisting back road.

What the plaque says

'In Canyon Below'. Constructed by Davidson M. Geiger and John H. Tilton in 1862, this old toll road was the most direct connection between the Comstock Lode and Truckee Meadows until replace by the present paved highway in 1936. Concord stages, mud wagons ten-mule freighters carried thousands of passengers and millions in precious cargo across this section of the Virginia Range and many are the tales of unpredictable winds, snows, landslides and the everlasting danger of lurking highwaymen which could be told of this precipitous stretch of road. Dead Man’s Point and Robber’s Roost, two of the most famous features of the road, can be seen from this marker.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 4.5 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 5.0 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Reno — 13 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Carson City — 15 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since

More markers nearby

• Geiger Station — 2.6 mi
• Steamboat Springs — 4.0 mi
• The Comstock Lode — 4.0 mi
• Piper’s Opera House — 4.4 mi