The Comstock Loop

The Route at a Glance

If U.S. 50 is the straight line ruled across Nevada's middle, the Comstock Loop is the knot tied at its western end — a day's drive that circles the strike that started everything. It begins in Reno and climbs the Geiger Grade, the switchbacking highway up the side of the Virginia Range, and tops out in Virginia City, the boomtown still strung along its mountainside where the Big Bonanza came out of the ground. From the Chollar Mine's timbered tunnel to C Street's wooden awnings, this is the center of the whole story.

From there the road drops south through Gold Hill and Silver City — the mills and the ditches that turned ore into bullion — and comes down to Carson City, where the silver became coin at the U.S. Mint and law under the Capitol's silver dome. Just south of town stands the Stewart Indian School, the other half of the reckoning. Then the loop climbs west on U.S. 50 over Spooner Summit to the east shore of Lake Tahoe at Glenbrook, the cove whose forests were cut and flumed down to shore up the mines — the lake is the Comstock's ghost as much as its playground.

The way home runs south to Genoa, Nevada's oldest town, dozing at the foot of the Sierra where the trail first came down, then north up the quiet length of Washoe Valley back into Reno. It is a small loop — about a hundred and forty miles — but it holds the entire machine: the strike, the mills, the mint, the forests, the dispossession, and the towns that outlived all of it. Drive it slowly. Pyramid Lake, the Numu's blue inland sea, lies a separate pilgrimage to the northeast, and asks to be visited on its own terms.

The Drive, Stop by Stop

7 stops along the route, in driving order from Reno to Reno.

1. 1

   Reno

   Reno

   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

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2. 2

   Virginia City

   Virginia City

   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

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3. 3

   Chollar Mine

   Virginia City

   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

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4. 4

   Carson City

   Carson City

   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

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5. 5

   Stewart Indian School

   Carson City

   Just south of Carson City

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6. 6

   Glenbrook & Spooner Summit

   Carson City

   Spur west on U.S. 50 over Spooner Summit

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7. 7

   Genoa

   Genoa

   Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it

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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Comstock Loop do what it does best.