We have traveled many roads during our 10 years of full timing – roads like Route 66, the Mother Road, the Pacific Coast Highway, the Overseas Highway (Florida Keys), the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Extraterrestrial Highway, the Turquoise Trail, and the Bear Tooth Highway just to name a few. So it was only natural for us to hook up the 5th wheel and head down the “loneliest” road in America. U.S. Route 50 (or Hwy 50) is a transcontinental highway stretching from West Sacramento, California in the west to Ocean City, Maryland on the east coast. The Nevada portion (which we were on) crosses the center of the state and was named The Loneliest Road in America by Life magazine in July 1986. It does live up to its name with large, rather desolate areas with little to no signs of civilization. One day while we were moving along we climbed (and descended) seven mountain passes – all around 7,000 feet. The truck worked hard that day!
We left Fallon, Nevada with only a short little drive with the destination being Austin, Nevada – an old mining town and about as close to a ghost town as you can get without it actually being one. We stayed overnight on a gravel patch with hookups – it was pretty quiet there. Austin has a rather interesting history and was discovered in 1862 by a horse belonging to a guy named W.H. Talbott. The horse, by accident, kicked up a piece of quartz containing gold and silver. Talbott sent the piece to Virginia City for assay. He staked out a claim, and when word got out, others followed - and a silver rush was on. One year later, 10,000 people occupied the town.
Today, the town is lucky if it has 200 or so living people - and a graveyard (a rather large one) with lots of stories and stones.
One of the “attractions” in Austin was the Stokes Castle – built 1897 – by an eastern rich dude (who was interested in the mines) as an exact replica of a tower outside Rome and was built out of hand hewn native granite. The huge slabs were raised by a hand operated windlass. It was built as a summer home for a son of this rich dude and was lived in for a total of ‘2’ months. (It took a year and a half to build.) It has been sitting and rotting, unoccupied, ever since. As you can tell it has degraded into the extreme fixer-upper category.
All around the Austin area, and this area of Nevada, the old mines and abandoned mining equipment lay where left behind after its purpose was served. Ghosts of riches and dreams of another era.
So after exploring Austin, we hit the road again and headed towards the megalopolis of Ely, Nevada and the surrounding copper mines.
As we headed into Ely, Nevada the first large signs of civilization is the Robinson Mine. This large open pit mine covers over six miles when you take the whole thing into account. The trucks and shovels are absolutely huge! They mine and process mainly copper with gold as a side product with the annual production being around 120 million pounds of copper and about 75,000 ounces of gold. Right next to the mine is the little town of New Ruth - an old, rather dilapidated little town where quite a few of the workers live. It was originally a mine-owned company town in the early 1900’s but has since gone to privately owned properties. 
As with a number of the old/older mining towns, there is lots of old equipment around. Here is an old road grader from the 1930s – now a lawn ornament. Not too far from this location is the ghost town of Elijah – the original mining town in the area founded in 1869. We wandered around there one day as we were watching the big mine trucks haul their loads back and forth, making those slag piles higher and higher.
We visited Ely for a few days, wandering around the area, visiting the mines and museums as well as a couple of hikes in the surrounding hills. We had been here just a couple of years ago so some of the attractions we had seen already. There is a railway museum or “Heritage Railway” there as well as the “Ghost Train of Old Ely” and if you are a bit of a train nut, I would highly recommend stopping. This time through we spent most of our time on the trails and museums.
Above is a little critter we ran into on one of our hikes – a Jerusalem Cricket – about the size of my thumb and reputed to have a rather nasty bite.
Here are a few of the exhibits at the White Pine Public Museum in Ely. We kind of like the “old” stuff – I guess that's why we are still married.
After Ely, we headed on down the road and our month long stay in the St. George area.
St. George is still growing and expanding in all directions – it used to be a little, quiet town. No longer! Our stay here is going as usual - doctor visits/checkups, visiting relatives, geocaching, exploring, sightseeing and anything else we can fit in. We did make a stop in a new spot this time – the old Silver Reef mining town and mines just north of St. George off the I-15. The displays seem to be fairly new and it kind of looks like it’s a work in progress. It is interesting though.
The world according to Snickers & Meggs
Meggs here! We are getting this full timing thing down pat. Our people provide us with a little home of our own while we are moving down the road in that big wheeled thing. It’s a good place to sleep and when we wake up we are in a new place – pretty cool! This latest new place hasn’t been so nice though – some new people came over to meet us - our people said something about a sister/in-law thing. She tried to feed me to her dogs – that was not very nice! Then to top it off my female people took me to a place called a vet! After sticking my brother with that needle thing and seeing what they did to him with that thermometer thing, I wasn’t going to let them stick me or put anything up my butt. They learned about the Meggs “spaz” mode that day - or as my male people says “going ugly early”. It’s not nice to treat me that way – if you do, you will pay. I’m back home now, a treat and a nap helped calm me down, but if I ever see a vet again, I will shred it.
Snickers here! Yes siree buddy! I’m a traveling cat – going to see the world. It’s bigger than I thought it would be - lots of roads and mountains and stuff. My sister and I do everything together - eat, sleep, play, and even use the kitten box at the same time. We even got to go see that vet thing, Meggs got real mad at them! I don’t think I want to talk about it. Our people said we are going to be here for a while because they have to go see their vets, too. Better them than me!
Snickers & Meggs
(P.S Keep that Trump guy away from us – we heard he likes to grab kittens!)
It always seems that we see and do so much more than what I put into the blog but I do have to cut it off somewhere - so we will leave you this time with a view of the cliffs near the entrance to Red Rock State Park just west of Hurricane, Utah.
Home is Where We Park It!
Lee & Linda
