Feature

A century of the Wildest, Richest Rodeo in the West. BY GUY CLIFTON In spring 1919, the Commercial Club of Reno—a precursor to the Reno Chamber of Commerce—created a committee known as the Reno Rodeo Association. The committee was filled with many of the city’s leading citizens, including cattle baron William H. Moffat, auto dealer […]

There is a lot to see in Nevada—110,557 square miles of rugged, picturesque mountains, lakes, and desert. Because of the state’s large size and wide-open spaces, it can be daunting for even the most courageous traveler to figure out how to see it all, or even where to start. That is where commemorative passports come into play.

Nevada roads go on forever. Small towns appear on the horizon, but are often quickly in the rearview mirror with little more than a passing thought about the town’s existence. And while tourism is the state’s largest industry—and the focus of this magazine—it is not why all towns in Nevada exist. This year, we honor some of those towns that defy easy description but stand tall in the desert, refusing to give into the sways of economic hardship or the passing of time. These towns bloom in the dirt, and they embody true grit. First up: Battle Mountain.

Vagabond rolling stock was centerpiece on the day America changed. BY GUY CLIFTON As artifacts go, Coach 17 is not the prettiest piece of Virginia & Truckee (V&T) rolling stock at the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City. Its exterior is rough, including multiple holes in the siding left courtesy of an untold number of acorn […]

During the night of Oct. 1, 1903, on the Southern Pacific line near Beowawe, The Atlantic Express and No. 219 trains barreled down the tracks; one headed east, one headed west, respectively. The only problem with this seemingly normal scenario was that the trains were on the same track, heading not in opposite directions, but directly toward each other. In the dead of night, two gigantic hunks of metal weighing thousands of tons and traveling at high rates of speed, collided head on.

Transitory Train Towns NEW RAIL ROUTES OFTEN LEFT OLD TOWNS OUT TO DRY. BY ERIC CACHINERO It is generally well known that train-sized holes were drilled through hundreds of yards of solid rock to lay railroad tracks during the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. In fact, throughout Donner Pass, countless tons of rock were […]

If you were to take all of the concrete used to build the Hoover (Boulder) Dam, there would be enough to create a 4-foot-wide sidewalk around the equator, or enough to build a two lane road from Seattle to Miami, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Department also estimates that the dam weighs 6.6 million tons (13,200,000,000 pounds). So how did 1930s-era civil and industrial engineers figure out how to transport approximately 13.2 billion pounds of concrete, along with millions more tons of metal and other materials? They teamed up with another type of engineer—the railroad engineer.