U.S. 50: The Great Basin Crossing
The far end of the Loneliest Road: 150 empty miles from Ely across the Great Basin to Delta and the Topaz camp.
The Route at a Glance
East of Ely, U.S. 50 runs out of towns. This is the far end of the Loneliest Road — the stretch that keeps going after Nevada's basin-and-range has emptied out, over the Schell Creek and Snake ranges toward a state line almost nobody watches cross. There are no services worth the name between Ely and Delta, 150 miles apart. Carry water and fuel, and mean it.
The payoff comes early. Great Basin National Park rises just south of the highway at Baker — 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak, bristlecone pines older than the pyramids, and Lehman Caves beneath it all, the whole park improbably empty because it is so far from anywhere. Beyond it the road tips into Utah and the country flattens hard into the Sevier Desert, an ancient lakebed where the mountains pull back and the sky takes over.
That emptiness is not incidental to this drive; it is the reason for its hardest stop. Fifteen miles northwest of Delta, on a wind-scoured shelf of that desert, the United States built Topaz — a concentration camp where it imprisoned more than 11,000 people of Japanese descent between 1942 and 1945, most of them American citizens from the San Francisco Bay Area. The government chose this ground precisely because it was far from everything. Stop at the Topaz Museum in Delta before you drive out to the site; the desert reads differently once you know what was done in it.
This is a road to take slowly, with a full tank and no schedule — the kind of drive that gives you room to think, and something worth thinking about at the end of it.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
4 stops along the route, in driving order from Ely, Nevada to Delta, Utah.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let U.S. 50: The Great Basin Crossing do what it does best.
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