Nevada Silver Trails
South-central Nevada's mining country — Tonopah and Goldfield, the ghost town of Rhyolite, Cathedral Gorge's clay spires, and the long straight run of the Extraterrestrial Highway.
By the 1890s, Nevada was dying. The Comstock that had built the state was twenty years played out, the mines were flooding, the population had collapsed, and the rest of the country had begun to wonder aloud whether a place this empty deserved to keep its statehood at all. Nevada had been a silver rush that ran out — a sagebrush afterthought the Union had admitted in a hurry during the Civil War and might, some argued, simply take back. Then, in the spring of 1900, a rancher chasing a stray burro across the south-central desert picked up a heavy rock, and the whole thing started over.
What Jim Butler found at Tonopah was the second-richest silver strike in Nevada history, and it set off the state's improbable second act. Two years later gold turned up twenty-five miles south at Goldfield, and for a few delirious years that camp was the largest city in Nevada — some twenty thousand people, a stone courthouse, a luxury hotel, electric light, and a world-championship prizefight staged to put the place on the map. The men these camps made — George Wingfield above all — went on to run Nevada's banks, casinos, and politics for the next half-century. The state that had nearly been written off was, for the second time, built on a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere.
It did not last, and that is the other half of the story. The ore pinched out, the booms collapsed about as fast as they had risen, fire and time did the rest, and the towns emptied — leaving behind the richest crop of ghost towns in the West. Rhyolite went from nothing to a city of stone and back to ruins inside a single decade. Goldfield, gutted by fire in 1923, still stands half-alive, more occupied building than ruin, its grand hotel shut since the Second World War. This is the country to come to if you want to see what a boom leaves when it leaves everything: courthouses with no county business, banks with no money, depots with no trains.
And then the desert itself became the draw. This is some of the emptiest land in the Lower 48 — basin after basin of creosote and distance, the loneliest stretches of the loneliest highways in America — and across the twentieth century the federal government found a use for all that nothing. The bombing ranges, the Test Site, the secret airfield at Groom Lake that the maps decline to name: a vast share of this quarter is closed, restricted, or simply unmarked, and the secrecy bred its own mythology. The Extraterrestrial Highway runs straight through the middle of it, past a town of a few dozen people and a bar full of alien kitsch, under skies so dark and clear they have become a destination in their own right.
It is not all mines and rumor. Off east, toward the Utah line, the desert softens into the banded clay cathedrals of Cathedral Gorge and the old rail-and-silver towns of Lincoln County — gentler, greener country than the bombing ranges to the west. But one thread runs through all of it: this is Nevada's second act and its long afterward, the quarter that saved the state, then emptied out, then turned its emptiness into the attraction. Come for the ghost towns and the boom that made them; stay for the silence, the dark, and the distances that swallow everything but the road.
What to See in Nevada Silver Trails
8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Roadside Stops
Nevada Silver Trails rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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