Sand Mountain Recreation Area
As so much of Nevada is desert, it’s only appropriate to take in some of the desert beauty on a road trip through the state. One of the most striking places to do that is Sand Mountain Recreation Area, 25 miles east of Fallon in the central part of the state.
Sand Mountain is a “singing” or “booming” dune known for the distinctive sound created when wind sweeps across the sand or when travelers walk across it. The dune is two miles long and 600 feet high at its highest point; the recreation area comprises 4,795 acres.
Adventurous groups can arrange to explore the dunes on sandboards, all-terrain vehicles or dune buggies. Many visitors also take time to check out the historic 1860 Pony Express station at the site or learn about the desert’s flora and fauna at the Sand Springs Desert Study Area.
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Rhyolite Ghost Town
The early-20th-century gold rush created a lot of boomtowns in Nevada, many of which went on to bust once the gold dried up. Just outside Beatty, travelers can see an extraordinary example of this cycle in Rhyolite, a ghost town that surpassed many of its contemporaries in design and ambition.
Rhyolite was founded in 1905 when gold-lace rock was found nearby. It peaked in 1907, with nearly 10,000 residents. Those citizens planned to make Rhyolite the next great Nevada metropolis and built their town out of stone and concrete, as opposed to the hastily built wooden construction of most boomtowns.
Today, visitors can see those same buildings and the ambitions that the town’s planners had more than 100 years ago. The town has a three-story office building, banks, churches, an opera house, hotels and dozens of streets with complete plumbing, electricity and telephone service. In addition to marveling at the empty town, groups can visit the Kelly Bottle House, the Goldwell Open Air Museum and the Historic Rhyolite Train Depot.
Lost City Museum
There are 27 active Native American communities in Nevada, each with its own story to tell. One of the most interesting stories can be found at the Lost City Museum, about an hour’s drive northeast of Las Vegas in Overton.
When the Hoover Dam was built, creating Lake Meade, in the early 20th century, the rising waters of the lake threatened to destroy the ancestral lands of the Anasazi Indians. So in 1935, the Civilian Conservation Corps excavated many of the historic sites around the lake and constructed the Lost City Museum as a repository for the artifacts found during those digs.
The two-story adobe building depicts pueblo architecture, and its exhibits showcase artwork, tools and other historic items found in the remains of the Anasazi communities. The museum continues to do archaeological research on remaining Lost City sites around the lake and offers tours and special programming for groups to explain the work.
