Elko
"Elko is the kind of American town that doesn't know it's interesting, which is exactly what makes it interesting."
Elko announced itself from fifty kilometers away, a cluster of lights in the darkness of the Humboldt River valley that resolved, as I drove closer, into a grid of streets that had the proportions of a real city — not a truck stop, not a junction — with a casino hotel visible from the highway and, unexpectedly, the silhouette of a legitimate downtown with buildings of some height and a main street wide enough for a cattle drive. Which, it turned out, was not a coincidence. Elko grew up as a railroad town and then a ranching center and then a gold mining hub, and all three economies left their mark simultaneously, so that the town has both a steakhouse where everyone knows everyone and a small Walmart and a grocery store with a decent wine section and a bar where someone is always playing country music and it is never ironic.
The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held every January since 1985, is one of the most specific cultural events in America — a week-long festival in which working cowboys, ranchers, and western writers gather to recite poetry, sing traditional ballads, and tell stories about the life of the contemporary range. It draws poets and musicians from across the American West and the audience is mostly the people who live this life, not tourists come to observe it. I arrived in late January and the Western Folklife Center was packed with men in Stetsons and women in pearl-snap shirts, all there to hear verse about calving season and drought and the specific emotional weight of a horse that knows you well. The quality was better than I expected, which said something about the tradition.
Elko’s Basque heritage is the culinary story of the town. When Basque immigrants came to Nevada in the late 1800s to herd sheep in the Basin and Range, they settled in Elko and its surroundings in numbers large enough to build a community. The restaurants they established — most famously the Star Hotel and Nevada Dinner House — still operate on the old boarding house model: family-style, communal tables, poured wine, and courses that don’t stop until you ask them to. The lamb is local, from herds that still run in the Ruby Valley. The picon punch arrives before the meal as a matter of ritual, and attempting to nurse it slowly marks you immediately as a tourist.
The gold mining history is present in a different register. The Carlin Trend, running northeast of Elko, is one of the most productive gold mining zones on earth — deposits of microscopic gold invisible to the naked eye but present in quantities that have made Nevada the fourth-largest gold producing jurisdiction in the world. The mines themselves are industrial in scale and closed to casual visitors, but the Northeastern Nevada Museum has an exhibition on the geology and history of gold in the region that’s more engaging than you’d expect, partly because the gold rush here is ongoing and the people explaining it have opinions.
East of town, on the flat sagebrush plains between Elko and the Utah border, wild horse herds still run. Nevada has the largest wild horse population in the United States — about half the national herd — and the mustangs around Elko are descendants of horses that escaped or were released from ranches and military operations going back to the Spanish colonial era. I drove out on a back road at sunrise and found a herd of twelve standing in a draw, their breath visible in the cold morning air, looking at me with the particular expression of an animal that has learned humans are complicated. I sat with the engine off for half an hour. Nobody came to tell me to move along.
When to go: January for the Cowboy Poetry Gathering — book accommodation months ahead, the town fills completely. June through September for weather; summer evenings in Elko are mild and the daylight runs long. Winter is cold and can be snowy but the town keeps operating regardless; this is not a place that shuts down for weather.