My month in Nevada

My take on Nevada

where I went this month

As you can see, I pretty much skirted the edges of the state and missed the entire middle.  There are only a few roads that service that middle - a few paved roads, I should say.  Most of the roads marked on the AAA map aren't paved.  

The "Home Means Nevada" plate is the current version and the kind that's issued if you get a new license plate today.  But many of the cars I saw were of "The Silver State" variety, and though I've searched the DMV website pretty hard, I can't figure out how people get them or when they were issued.  That "Home Means Nevada" slogan, by the way, is the name of the state song.  "The Silver State" is NV's official nickname.

Nevada's a big state - 500 miles long and more than 300 miles wide - and most of the roadways aren't interstates, or actually anything more than 2-lane roads.  It takes time to get from anywhere to anywhere else.  I did the best I could and think I saw a representative sample, even if I had to miss some specifics.

I think I'd have to summarize Nevada as being a study in contrasts.  

Las Vegas stakes its fortune on being "Sin City," and every town of any size has at least one casino.  I saw slot machines in regular grocery stores like Safeway.  And though NV ranks 5th lowest in church attendance nationwide, I still saw active churches in every town I visited.

Nevada bases much of its economy on entertaining people - gambling and nightclub shows, hiking and camping and wildlife viewing, bicycling and off-roading.  

But there's plenty of traditional work going on here too, especially in ranching and mining.  To avoid the need for irrigating, most farmland is used for ranching - especially beef cattle, though there are also dairy cattle and 70,000 sheep here.  Nevada is the #1 gold producer in the US and #3 in the world.  It ranks #2 for silver, after Alaska.  NV mines most of the US's barite, along with a number of other metals.  It produces a third of the US's share of diatomite (used for filters and kitty litter).

Nevada has some of the hottest and coldest temperatures in the US.  It's the driest state of the 50, but it can get flash flooding, too.  The climate feels very different between Las Vegas and, say, Winnemucca - there can be a 15° to 20° temperature difference between the two, as well as a moisture difference.  And I think that's likely because of the neighbors.  Winnemucca's close to the forests of Oregon while Las Vegas is in the Mojave Desert, with more than 400 miles in between the two towns.

Las Vegas is a majority minority city, where most residents were born outside Nevada, while rural residents tend to be less diverse in each community (though those communities may consist primarily of minorities) and be mostly native-born Nevadans.  But 75% of Nevadans were born elsewhere - the highest percentage in the country.

But the one thing that seems to me to tie the state together is the desert.  I think it's unique among the states for this.  Sure, there's plenty of desert in New Mexico and Arizona and California, and I visited a lot of the desert set-asides in those states.  But each of those states also has forests and other life forms that aren't desert-related.  But in Nevada, the desert is what it is.  Of course there are trees here, but they're mostly the kind that can survive desert conditions.  I suppose you could say the exception is the Lake Tahoe area, which of course is partly in Nevada, but there's so little of it in the state that it's really more the exception that proves the rule.  If you don't like desert, then this is not the place for you to live. 

In case I'm sounding critical, I want to hasten to say that I liked the time I spent here.  I couldn't really be fair and give Nevada the entire month, which it deserved, because of having been so unprepared for California.  But although doing much driving in this state can be boring because of not much more than desert to look at, I enjoyed it nonetheless.  

Though the sandstorm near Tonopah was unnerving and disorienting, it was an experience I won't forget.  Though I thought the Las Vegas Strip was incredibly gaudy and cheap, I also thought it looked like a lot of fun.  My impression is that this is a state where people are doing their best against the odds.