A love letter to US Route 50, America’s loneliest highway

The essence of lonely is embodied after peeling off Highway 50 into a dusty parking lot at Middlegate Station, a pit stop in the Nevada desert about an hour from any cities in both directions. 

There’s a small wooden building that appears to have been standing for at least 100 years and near the front door a wooden plaque announces the official population — 17. (Although it’s clear that the number 18 has been scratched out.) I have a feeling the bar and restaurant may be keeping an accurate tally.
 
Stepping inside, I simultaneously step back in time and saddle up to the bar for a drink and a burger. It could be some time before I see another opportunity to stop on the lonesome highway.

Nevada is known for desolate roads that take you through the middle of nowhere, but none of them is quite as famous for having forlorn features as Highway 50.
 
Binding continental United States like a belt at the midriff, Highway 50 starts at the Atlantic Ocean in Maryland to laterally carve through Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati; St. Louis; Kansas City, Missouri; Grand Junction, Colorado; and South Lake Tahoe, before tapering off in Sacramento. 
 
Across the divide, it’s the 409 miles of highway across northern Nevada that’s developed a unique reputation following a feature in Life Magazine that declared it “the loneliest road in America” in 1986. The publication painted the long stretch through the Silver State — from Fernley to Ely — as a barren, rural wilderness that no one should traverse unless they felt confident in their survival skills. 

Although the long ranges through Nevada were deemed lonesome, communities along Highway 50 are embracing the recognition, nearly four decades after the article first defined the roadway. Or they’re bucking it completely.
 
“Here, there are no lines,” said Mark Bassett, president of the Nevada Northern Railway Museum. He compared the region to other outdoorsy destinations such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park. “You are really getting back to Mother Earth — it is all about you.”

Praising the topography, Bassett said there are nearly 20 mountain passes between Ely and Reno. “It is not a boring drive,” he reasoned, “because every time you pop over one of those mountain passes, you have a new vista.”
 
The full trip from Fernley to Ely requires a few days of travel and I recently set out to understand what makes a highway lonely, and who gets to define it. For five days and four nights I traversed the stretch of Highway 50 best known for its ties to the Pony Express, and the same route that inspired Life Magazine’s report years before my birth.
 
What I discovered was an open landscape brimming with esoteric discoveries. 

Every nook conceals its own hidden gems — or in the case of Garnet Hill near Ely, where you can go rockhounding, actually gems — to create a journey that would excite any weary traveler. Instead of lonely towns with little to do, I unearthed centuries-old ghost stories, navigated caves while learning the difference between stalagmites and stalactites and took in some of the most magnificent dark skies the country has to offer.

All the while, I met dozens of friendly folks who made the “lonely” highway feel awfully homey.

On Saturday afternoons, patrons can take a 30-minute tour of the production facility and surrounding property. “When you meet as many people as we do during a visit to our distillery and farm, it’s hard to think of it as the ‘loneliest road,’ at least from our perspective,” said Frey Ranch co-owner Ashley Frey.
 
On the way out of town, I pulled off to Sand Mountain, a singing sand dune located about 25 miles southeast. It’s typically amok with ATVs running up the 600-foot-high hill or plenty of RVs that have come in for the weekend. It makes for a cool geography for photos, mostly because it looks like you traveled over 20 hours by air to get there, not that you simply crossed the state line. 

On a rare day, you may also see people sandboarding, a great — and potentially dangerous — way to spend the in-between season before the snow falls.

Austin, another one of Highway 50’s “biggest” towns in Nevada, boasted a population of 101 as of 2020. 

I reveled in a bit of history in Austin. There are 47 Pony Express Stations along Highway 50, and one of the easiest to snag a photo of is just a few miles west of Austin. The route marker for the historic mail system is clearly visible just off the road. 

While hot springs are often luxurious destinations for travelers, Austin’s hot springs are surprisingly a throwback. Spencer Hot Springs sits on Bureau of Land Management-managed lands and is open to the public. Instead of a pay-to-use resort, Spencer Hot Springs offers a large steel tub constructed over the natural springs. 

A wooden board is the only place to sit, aside from in the water, but the views of snow-capped mountaintops in the blazing orange sunsets are unmatched.

Whether Eureka is haunted is up for debate, but after spending the night and touring the town, my opinion is that the town is likely haunted. The Great Eureka Ghost Hunt, an ongoing event that bills itself as “a paranormal investigation,” showed me around to hotspots for the occult activity around town. 

Or you can visit the underground tunnels and learn the deep history of nefarious activity, including bootlegging. If you have the guts, sleep at Jackson House Hotel. If you’re scared, the sister property Gold Country Inn claims fewer ghosts.

Great Basin National Park is one of the least visited national parks in the U.S. “The national park saw over 150,000 visitors last year, which still makes it one of the lowest-visited parks in the country, providing that old-school national park feel,” said Kyle Horvath, director of tourism for White Pine County Tourism and Recreation Board. 

I figured that’s probably because there’s no easy way to get there. Located in the southeastern corner of the state, it attracts people visiting for the natural wonders, including some of the darkest skies in the contiguous United States.
 
The Lehman Caves — believed to have formed when sulfuric acid started dissolving marble along natural fractures — are the park’s most popular feature. You’ll need to book your tour ahead of time if you want to head into the underground.

During the tour, an experienced guide takes groups through tunnels of active stalactites and stalagmites, plus columns, draperies, flowstone, helictites and rare shield formations.

There is a point in Ely where you’ll see a sign that reads, “Next Gas 167 miles,” — it’s accurate. However for Ely, isolation is the perk. It’s why people move from big cities to take up space in a place less inhabited.
 
The itinerary here is heavy on stars and trains. The Nevada Northern Railway museum and the state-owned East Ely Railroad Depot Museum allow guests to tour some of the oldest and most storied steam trains in the country. 

I came back at night to ride on the modern railway and view a few stars. There were Sunset, Stars and Champagne train rides available to take guests out to where the skies are the darkest and provide astronomy lessons. While most of the train cars are indoors to keep you warm, there is an uncovered car for the best viewing.
 
If time remains, visit Garnet Hill just outside of town. Named by the locals, the public lands are open to visitors who want to collect ruby red garnets readily available all over the area. 

The activity is called rockhounding, and tourists can easily walk away with small bags of the semiprecious stones.

I had about a seven-hour drive over the mountains and through the desert to reach Sacramento from the eastern edge of Ely. On the way, I embraced a perk of the highway’s reputation and counted just a few cars on the road.