Reno

The Truckee River runs right through the middle of Reno, which is the first thing that catches you off guard if you arrive expecting a smaller version of the Strip. People kayak it on summer afternoons. There are picnic benches along its banks where old men play chess and food truck festivals set up in the green space between the river walk and the casino district. The river arrives from Lake Tahoe in the west, tumbling down through the Sierra Nevada, and by the time it hits downtown Reno it has become this wide, muscular, genuinely beautiful waterway threading through a city that barely knows what to do with such a gift.

I came in on a Thursday afternoon in late September and checked into a downtown hotel that had clearly been renovated about fifteen years ago and not since, which suited the general Reno aesthetic — functional, unpretentious, occasionally improbable. The casino in the lobby had maybe thirty people in it. The poker room was half full. Down the street, the Riverwalk District had a farmers market winding up for the afternoon, and I bought a bag of Bartlett pears from an old man who told me without being asked that he’d grown them himself in Fallon, forty-five minutes east.

The Basque restaurants on 4th Street are one of the great specific pleasures of the American West. Nevada has the highest concentration of Basque immigrants outside of Spain and France, a remnant of the sheep-herding migration of the late nineteenth century, and the restaurants they founded — family-style, communal, loud, and generous — are still operating in a row of buildings on 4th that feel insulated from any year. At the Star Hotel, I sat at a long table with strangers and ate lamb stew and a picon punch — the Basque cocktail of Amer Picon, grenadine, and a float of brandy — and by the third shared bottle of wine the table was discussing a sheep-shearing competition with the seriousness of a cabinet meeting.

The arts scene is real, which surprises people who’ve written Reno off as a casino town. The Nevada Museum of Art is the only accredited art museum in the state and its building — a black volcanic-stone exterior that references the rock formations of the Black Rock Desert — is itself worth a look. The Midtown district, south of the railroad tracks, runs through a stretch of bungalows and storefronts that have been colonized by galleries, tattoo parlors, independent coffee shops, and the occasional bar that bills itself as a dive but clearly has opinions about its cocktail menu.

In late August and early September, Reno functions as the staging ground for Burning Man. The festival itself happens sixty miles north in the Black Rock Desert, but Reno absorbs the overflow — dusty RVs getting provisions at the Walmart on East 4th, costumed participants spilling out of motels into casino lobbies, a general atmosphere of controlled chaos that the city handles with practiced equanimity. The week after Burning Man, when the playa crowd returns and passes through on the way home, Reno has a particular energy: tired, cheerful, sunburned, and unwilling to explain.

When to go: May through October are the most pleasant months. July and August are warm and dry and the river is at its most active. September captures the tail end of summer and the beginning of the Burning Man season’s residue. January brings snow, which makes the downtown streets look briefly beautiful and the casino parking lots immediately treacherous.