Every mining region eventually faces the same question — what do you do when the ore runs out — and Nevada has answered it three different ways. The Comstock answered with respectability: Virginia City banked its silver, helped build San Francisco, and talked its way into early statehood. Las Vegas answered with neon and the legal vices. The Silver Trails — the long, thin middle of the state, strung between dead camps and dry lakebeds — had neither of those cards. When its mills went quiet, what it was left holding was the opposite of an asset: distance, ruins, and a great deal of nothing.
So it made the nothing into the show. This is the corner of Nevada that turned absence into an attraction — that learned to sell the ruin, the uncanny, and the unexplained, because emptiness was the one thing the busts left behind in abundance. Drive it and you pass a forest of buried cars, a congregation of plaster ghosts, a motel that keeps a graveyard, and a highway named for aliens. None of it is an accident. It is what a place builds when the wealth is gone and the strangeness is all that's left to work with.
Free-range art
Goldfield was the biggest city in Nevada once — twenty thousand people on gold that gave out inside a decade. A couple hundred remain now, in a town that lost most of its buildings to fire and never rebuilt them. On the southern edge, down a dirt track off US-95, is the thing Goldfield is arguably best known for today: the International Car Forest of the Last Church, more than forty cars, vans, and buses planted nose-down in the desert or stacked at angles that shouldn't hold, every panel spray-painted and painted over again by whoever shows up with a can.
It began in 2002 with one man, Mark Rippie, and an ambition to out-do Nebraska's Carhenge and set a record for the most upended vehicles in a single work. A Reno artist named Chad Sorg drove through, saw a car standing on its nose in the sand, and moved to Goldfield to help build the rest. The two eventually fell out — Sorg left, Rippie later went to prison on gun charges — but the forest stayed, and other hands keep repainting it. The state, for its part, leaned in, and now markets this stretch of US-95 as the Free-Range Art Highway. There is no admission and no plaque explaining any of it. You park on the dirt, walk among the wreckage, and make of it what you will — which is, more or less, the regional aesthetic in a sentence.
Ghosts overlooking a ghost town
Forty-odd miles south, past Beatty, the road into the ghost town of Rhyolite passes a scatter of white figures standing out in the sagebrush. This is the Goldwell Open Air Museum, and the figures are the oldest thing in it: The Last Supper, made in 1984 by the Belgian sculptor Albert Szukalski, who draped plaster-soaked burlap over live models, let it set, and slipped the models out — leaving thirteen hollow shrouds arranged like Leonardo's painting, facing out across the valley toward the ruins of the town. Szukalski expected the piece to last two years in the weather. Four decades later it still stands, and the site around it now draws something like two hundred thousand people a year.
He chose the spot on purpose. Rhyolite was a full city in 1907 — concrete, rail, electric light, five thousand people — and a near-total ghost by 1920, and Szukalski wanted his figures to hold their supper in front of exactly that: a monument to how fast ambition empties out in this country. Other Belgian artists followed him into the desert to add their own work, and the whole strange garden asks the question the ghost town behind it asks more plainly — what remains when everything else is gone. The instinct isn't new here. A few hundred yards on, Rhyolite's most photographed ruin is a house a miner built in 1906 out of some fifty thousand discarded bottles, because bottles were the material the saloons left lying around. Make something out of the leftovers: it is the same move, a century apart.
The motel that keeps a graveyard
Tonopah is the town on this drive that refused to die — the 1900 silver strike here pulled the whole state out of a slump — and it has made a careful business of its own darkness. On the north edge of town stands the Clown Motel: thirty-odd rooms and several thousand clowns, opened in 1985 by the children of a local miner and clown collector, and built directly against the Old Tonopah Cemetery. That graveyard is not a prop. It filled and closed inside a single decade, 1901 to 1911, taking the dead of a 1902 pneumonia the papers called the Tonopah plague and of the Belmont mine fire that killed seventeen men in 1911 — among them one who rode the hoist down twice to bring others up, and didn't come back the third time.
The motel leans all the way in — it bills itself as America's Scariest Motel and turns up regularly on ghost-hunting television — and so does the town's grand old hotel, the Mizpah, which sells the story of a murdered Lady in Red on its fifth floor. It would be easy to call all this cynical, and the people who run it mostly don't argue. But there's an honest mechanism underneath. The clowns get travelers off the highway; once off the highway, they walk through the cemetery gate, read the tin markers on the graves, and wind up at the mining park learning how the silver actually came out of the ground. The kitsch is a door. What's behind it is real history that would otherwise draw no one at all.
Where the map goes blank
The strangeness reaches its logical end on the region's eastern edge, where State Route 375 runs ninety-eight empty miles along the boundary of the most secret ground in America. Groom Lake — Area 51 — sits just over the ridgeline, an Air Force installation the government spent decades declining to admit existed, next to the Nevada Test Site where the country detonated its atomic bombs. When land is that blank and that forbidden, people fill it in themselves. After a Las Vegas television station aired one man's 1989 claim to have worked on captured flying saucers out there, the emptiness acquired a mythology — and in 1996 the state made it official, renaming SR-375 the Extraterrestrial Highway and dedicating it alongside the release of the alien-invasion film Independence Day, joke Speed Limit Warp 7 sign and all.
Today the whole spur reads as participatory folk art. Its one settlement, Rachel — population somewhere under a hundred — calls itself the UFO Capital of the World and runs the Extraterrestrial Highway's only café, the Little A'Le'Inn, which greets you with "Earthlings Welcome" and serves an Alien Burger under about the darkest sky left in the Lower 48. What's actually overhead is often a genuinely classified aircraft on approach to Groom Lake — which is the joke and the truth at once. Something really is out there; the government just won't say what. The region took the one thing it was forbidden to know and set a welcome mat in front of it.
The one thing that never ran out
The three other stories of the Silver Trails are all stories of things that got spent. The fire under the silver made the metal; the bitter water decided who got to keep it; and the boom raised the cities and then took them back. Culture here is what happened after — the thing the region made once the extractable wealth was gone, out of the only inventory it had left: empty desert, abandoned towns, a horizon nobody could explain.
Those, it turns out, are renewable. The gold gave out and the silver gave out, but the ruins don't, the distance doesn't, and the mystery — sealed up at Area 51 and poured out at a bar in Rachel — refills itself every night the sky goes dark. The Silver Trails found the one resource on the whole drive that never runs dry: the human need to make something out of nothing. Cars for a forest, plaster for ghosts, clowns for a graveyard, aliens for a highway. It is not, in the end, a con. It is what people do with a beautiful, ruined, wide-open place when they're left alone with it long enough.