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It’s lonely out there. Sometimes the road ahead is just a line to the horizon that doesn’t care if we run out of gas and reminds us that we’re tiny traveling blips in the vast macrocosm of the universe. That’s pretty much what it’s like to drive Highway 50 through Nevada — a stretch that’s been named the Loneliest Road in America. Depending on your route, the road trip is 375-500 miles and while you can do it in a day, it's suggested that you budget three.
Life Magazine first created the moniker to refer to a 287-mile portion of the route between Ely and Fernley in 1986, noting that the highway, “passes nine towns, two abandoned mining camps, a few gas pumps and the occasional coyote.” Despite the quietude and vast amounts of time that can pass before you see another car, you’ll see several mountains — Wheeler Peak is 13,065 feet — shoot past Great Basin National Park and Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, and have access to a whole lot of historic towns. You’ll be roughly following the path of the Pony Express and the wagon trains of the Overland Stagecoach trails.
Throughout the drive, you have a chance to prove to yourself that you’ve got what it takes to survive. The Nevada Commission on Tourism has created a faux-leather passport booklet called the Official Hwy 50 Survival Guide. At various stops in eight different cities, you can get your book stamped. Once you’ve accrued stamps from at least five of the eight, you can fill out the back page’s postage-paid postcard and drop it in the mail to receive back a survivor certificate.
Some of the highlights include the historic mint and the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City, the 125,000-acre remnants of ancient Lake Lahontan now known as Pyramid Lake, an archaeological site in Grimes Point that contains Native American petroglyphs on the trailside rocks, ATV-worthy sand dunes at Sand Mountain, an 1897 stone castle in Austin, and a state park in Ely with giant beehive-shaped stone ovens to create charcoal for area mines. At Great Basin, you can see Bristlecone pine trees, our world’s oldest living things. There’s a lot of quirk-per-mile here, maybe even enough to stave off the desolation.