Finally Friday musings: When only big sky and great open spaces feel like home, visiting can be a bittersweet journey

View of the Snake Range inside Great Basin National Park, Nevada. (Photo by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder)

A Love Letter to Nevada’s Wide Open Spaces

by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder

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One of my favorite places in the world is a small town called Baker west of the Nevada-Utah border where weird sculptures made of rusting car parts border the road and a joint general store-motel offers anything you might need, including obscure books on the American West and artisan beer and coffee, depending on the time of day and your mood.

Perhaps best known as the gateway to Great Basin National Park (one of the country’s least crowded national parks and my personal favorite), Baker is also at the beginning – or the end, depending on which way you’re driving – of the “Loneliest Road in America,” i.e. the section of Highway 50 that stretches from Baker to Dayton, Nevada.

But this road is far from lonely: small towns like Ely and Austin provide excellent stops for the intrepid road tripper looking to see an abandoned silver mining-era castle or eat at a retro diner that’s retro because it’s been in business since the 1950s, not retro because they decorated it that way. For me, the sagebrush and red-tailed hawks offer more than enough company for the six-hour drive across the state. 

Rural Nevada is a place unlike anywhere else I’ve been. The seventh biggest-by-land state in the country, Nevada boasts an enormous amount of open space once you get outside the metro-areas of Reno or Las Vegas, and it’s one of the only places I’ve been where you could get pulled over for driving under 80 miles per hour. And with the way I like to drive through the state, getting pulled over for being too slow is a real risk, but I can’t help it: rural Nevada is a place I want to linger.

I was born and raised in Nevada, first in Carson City and then Reno. I moved away from home five years ago now, and at best I return once a year to visit. I know I will visit less often as the people I know there move away for their own big adventures. 

The last time I was in Reno, the most noticeable change was the sprawl. The cookie cutter houses and roads spewing all directions felt unbearably suburban. The new Starbucks and Cracker Barrel and In-N-Out burned big on the landscape. It felt unoriginal, overdone, and a little bit lonely. All I could think about was how desperately I wanted to drive east until I made it to the Loneliest Road in America, where maybe, finally, I could recognize the state I so love. 

Suburban sprawl is a dilemma in many cities, not just Reno. I also know that romanticizing small towns, like I am wont to do in Nevada, can detract from the real issues facing rural America. But in Nevada, the difference between urban and rural is stark, and more and more, the places that feel most like home in Nevada aren’t the cities but the wide open spaces outside of them. 

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.