Small Towns

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.

Welcome to the most remote town in the lower 48: Jarbidge, Nevada. (No, not “Jarbridge”, Jarbidge. While we’re at it, it’s not “Ne-vah’-da”, either.)

Situated in the 180-square-mile Jarbidge Wilderness, the namesake town tests the limits of the axiom about the journey being the destination. The “nearest” “major” city is Twin Falls, Idaho, a town of 35,000 people that’s 92 miles away, most of that on quiet county roads and dirt. We traveled from the next closest destination of decent size: Elko, Nevada, home to 17,000 people and 100 miles from Jarbidge.

The trip from Elko takes a couple of hours. The guidebooks state that a car can make the trip, but at times it even felt treacherous in a full-size 4WD SUV. The only vehicles we passed along the dirt portion of the program were other SUVs, passenger trucks, and plenty of ATVs..

Estimates of Jarbidge’s population range from 12 to 20. Why there isn’t an authoritative, exact count of such an easily quantifiable population is unclear. We would have conducted the census ourselves, but the locals don’t take kindly to outsiders pressing them for information.

Case in point, the Sagebrush Rebellion of the mid-1990s. To summarize – a flood washed out a nearby road. Representatives of the U.S. Forest Service decided to close the road, reasoning this would give the local bull trout population a chance to grow. The locals, with the backing of county government officials, decided to open the road themselves. People from all across the West descended upon the town to offer their help in beating back a voracious and nonrepresentative federal government, in the form of manual labor. The “Jarbidge Shovel Brigade” kept the road open and is memorialized by the 28′ high shovel in the picture.

Enter Las Vegas-to-Jarbidge on Google, Bing, Yahoo and Mapquest and you’ll see 4 different routes. Ours involved taking State Route 225 north of Elko, then heading east on County Road 746. From there, signs are as sparse as asphalt. The wildlife is not shy, with plenty of mule deer and even the occasional pronghorn. But the most exotic wildlife we encountered – if by exotic you mean alien and curious – were the untold numbers of Mormon crickets swarming the dirt road at various points. These infernal katydids, many of them the size of a chihuahua puppy, are the bane of Elko county. They can travel in packs up to a mile long and a mile wide, the ones in front motivated to cover ground by having their cannibalistic brethren marching behind. No one wants to get a flat tire on an off-road adventure, but especially not where there’s a danger of sharing the ground with a few myriad giant insects. Fortunately, they can’t fly.

Jarbidge itself sits over 6000′ above sea level, but still 2000′ below the surrounding mountains, which presumably makes traveling here in the winter a challenge. In the summer, however, the place is gorgeous and thoroughly modern – the food is plentiful, the credit cards are honored, and even the telephones work (land lines were installed in 1984. Cell phones, any decade now.)

To return, we continued north out of town, on an additional 17 miles of dirt before crossing into Idaho and driving another 45 miles east to the town of Rogerson, complete with gas pumps. Rogerson sits on U.S. Highway 93. Take it south to Jackpot, Nevada, a border town where Twin Fallsians go to gamble.

A century late and a dollar short

Jarbidge