Ghost Towns

Not Round Mountain Mine (Kennecott Copper Mine-imagine it's in Nevada and there's gold instead of copper)

Like Belmont, Manhattan sits at the end of state route that’s really more of a spur road. But at least it’s paved. We headed west and made a quick return to Route 376, then north to Round Mountain.

Round Mountain’s primary attraction is its open-pit gold mine, owned equally by Canadian extraction giants Barrick and Kinross. The mine is so lucrative, and thus the pit grew so big, that it forced the town itself to move a few miles west to the other side of the highway. The resultant company town is a model of cleanliness and uniformity, with shining streets, a golf course, and immaculately manicured (and pedicured) lawns. The new, incongruous Round Mountain is officially named “Hadley”, although no one calls it that. It’s the Levittown of rural Nevada, situated in a place where you’d expect to see people living in prehistoric shacks and decaying concrete bungalows. A few of which remain at the original Round Mountain.

One of the hardest parts about negotiating travel in rural Nevada is keeping oneself fed. (Yes, the pioneers had it harder. No one disputes this.) Tonopah has the only proper supermarket for miles and miles, and failure to stock means getting famished with no visible respite. The upcoming village of Carvers had a couple of roadhouses, but to stop there or continue to the next significant town, Austin?

Austin it was, which was a bad decision for at least two reasons. Austin is situated on U.S. Highway 50, officially The Loneliest Road in America but as anyone who’s traveled through Nevada knows, it doesn’t crack the top 10 in the state. Our eventual destination was Elko, more than 200 miles to the northeast, but in this part of the state the most convenient food and your night’s terminus don’t necessarily lie on the same line. We instead traveled west to Austin (pop. 340), situated beyond the most treacherous curves we’d encountered so far. And a hand-lettered sign warning of a speed trap on the edge of town. And a final sharp turn into a courteous and unswayable highway patrolman. In today’s America, with governments looking for revenue everywhere possible, no male is getting out of that $72 fine.

Austin is dying, and good riddance. It offers the only services on a 180-mile stretch of the Loneliest Road, which means the town will always exist in some form until the invention of the mass-produced hovercar. Lunch at the only restaurant in town – I wasn’t hungry for some unfathomable reason – and then we changed our itinerary on the fly yet again.

Austin was the seat of Lander County until 1979, when an already speedy population decline forced the local government to move, as we then did, 89 miles north. To Battle Mountain, another piece of Nevada eclectica, only with a less-than-complimentary nickname: “The Armpit of America.”

Several hundred locales, of course, have been considered the nation’s axilla: and as armpits come in pairs, I nominate Camden, New Jersey and Gary, Indiana. But Battle Mountain embraced the moniker after self-consciously cosmopolitan Washington Post Gene Weingarten reporter referred to the town as such (and took a similar view of much of the rest of rural Nevada) in a 2001 article. Old Spice sponsored an “Armpit Festival” the following year, an annual event that never made it to its 3^rd birthday. For the record, Battle Mountain is a perfectly functional and sanitary unincorporated area, and more to the point, an ideal fuel stop that sits abreast of Interstate 80. A divided highway with an 80-mph speed limit sounded about right after a day of downshifting and praying for tires to remain resilient.

Tuscarora, NV (pop. 266)

The interstate took us through Carlin, which is near (these things are relative) the largest gold mine in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s also about 30 miles south of where in 2009 we came face-to-face with a wolf. Which would be commonplace in the Yukon, unusual in parts of Idaho, but a singular event in Nevada. Only a few months earlier, local authorities had confirmed the first sighting of a wolf in the state since World War II. Our unofficial but verifiable sighting suffered for lack of a quickly functioning camera.

And then to Elko, which as recently as the late 1990s was Nevada’s 4^th-largest metropolitan area with a population of 30,000 or so. It’s since fallen behind Pahrump, the bedroom community 60 miles west of Las Vegas that’s most famous for its legal prostitution. To an ignorant East Coast newspaper columnist, Elko is “charmless” and “tacky”. To a pair of tired Nevadans, Elko meant an inviting if temporary home.

Yes, a good trip is more about the journey than the destination, but you still have to end up somewhere. And as the journey progresses, options fall away and the choice of destination becomes more focused. We agreed to spend the next night in Salt Lake City, an easy 230-mile ride over the interstate. But with no pressing need to arrive as fast as possible, where’s the fun in that? (There isn’t. So we improvised…)

A: Central Nevada, the Chicago Cubs, William McKinley.

Q: Name 3 entities that reached their zenith a century ago.

Tonopah (pop. 2,627) and Goldfield (440) are the two “major” settlements in what’s conventionally if erroneously labeled Central Nevada. The seats of their respective counties, the towns sit 27 miles apart on one of the emptiest stretches of an empty road. When the silver mines were at their busiest, Goldfield was Nevada’s largest city; 20,000 strong, and influential enough to host what was then the biggest boxing title fight in history. (The lightweight bout lived up to the hype, too: former champ Joe Gans took 42 rounds to regain his belt from Oscar “Battling” Nelson.) Today, the largely abandoned town serves as the gateway to the more prestigious Tonopah. This area holds the distinction of being farther away from an interstate highway than anywhere else in the United States.

If you couldn't tell from the picture, a mucker shovels ore or rock into the mine cars

Tonopah is so small that the high school plays 8-man football (3-man offensive line, and typically 2 running backs and 2 tight ends; 3-3-2 on defense.) We unwittingly visited on the biggest day of the year – the day Tonopah High (Home of the Muckers) hosts its cross-county rival from 60 miles up the road, and our next scheduled stop, Round Mountain. The students formed a chain across the main drag and screamed something unintelligible outside our hotel room in the middle of the night, then disassembled to enjoy Tonopah’s world-renowned nightlife.

We set sail for Round Mountain, but first, an irresistible detour: 40 miles out of our way, the somewhat adjacent hamlets of Belmont and Manhattan.

The major (only) paved road heading north out of Tonopah is State Route 376, which passes through Round Mountain and terminates in Austin, more on which later. Past the makeshift rodeo grounds outside of Tonopah, and yet another abandoned mine, sits the unmarked and often unpaved State Highway 82, whose only purpose is to ferry the curious into and out of the semi-retired mining camp of Belmont. Not only is the distance to the nearest gas greater than the distance from New York City to Delaware, you’ve got to travel on some challengingly graded roads to access said gas.

You can't get away from politics

At a gaudy 7600’ above sea level, Belmont is yet another claimant to the title of erstwhile biggest or 2^nd-biggest city in Nevada. The town claimed 15,000 people during its 1870s heyday, and an inexact 2-digit number today. The usual criterion for judging ghost towns seems to be level of preservation, and by that standard, Belmont qualifies. A 21^st century Catholic church sits near the summit of Cemetery Hill, Belmont’s highest point. The church is so tiny that from a distance it looks like an unusually pious travel kiosk. In a town with barely enough residents to fill the rosters for a Papists vs. Reformists basketball game, the Catholics understandably invite other denominations to hold services on the premises.

The featured attraction in Belmont is the brick courthouse, which was in use when Belmont was the seat of Nye County – a title ceded to Tonopah in 1905. The courthouse is a state park, and ostensibly open to the public, but the padlocked doors suggest otherwise.

A detailed tour of Belmont, including one of the two cemeteries, takes about 20 minutes. This leaves ample time to find a more inventive way to the next stop. Rather than retrace State Highway 82 the 26 miles back to its confluence at State Route 376, we took the Explorer through the Forest Service roads to the one remaining settlement between Belmont and Round Mountain – Manhattan.

The grandiose name was no accident, nor was this Manhattan’s failure to eclipse its New York counterpart. Founded in 1867, Manhattan now claims 124 residents, none of whom were visible this day. Manhattan is also the only place in rural Nevada where the political yard signs indicated any notable support for incumbent U.S. Senator Harry Reid. If our trip counts as an unscientific poll, Sharron Angle can begin measuring the drapes for her office in the Dirksen Building.

Journey to the Center of Nevada

A century late and a dollar short