Tonopah

US-50 through Nevada is officially designated the Loneliest Road in America, a marketing label that turned out to be entirely accurate on the afternoon I drove it east from Fallon — four hundred miles of two-lane highway crossing the Basin and Range in a series of long, straight runs between mountain passes, with virtually nothing in between except the occasional ranch mailbox and the constant company of the big sky. Tonopah appears at the junction with US-95, a surprise of actual streets and brick buildings after so much emptiness, sitting at the south end of a valley bracketed by two volcanic mountain ranges, and the first thing I saw coming in was the Mizpah Hotel’s neon sign glowing pink against the early evening sky.

Tonopah had its moment in 1900 when Jim Butler discovered a silver vein on his ranch and set off the richest silver strike in Nevada history. Within a decade, thirty thousand people lived here. The mines ran through the 1940s, then the ore played out, and the population contracted to what it is today — about two thousand — leaving behind an extraordinary collection of early twentieth-century buildings that never got torn down because there was no money to replace them. Walking down Main Street past the Mizpah and the old county courthouse and the original bank building is like walking through a perfectly preserved stage set, except that people actually live and work here.

The Mizpah Hotel, opened in 1908, is the single best reason to stay the night in Tonopah rather than pass through. The building is five stories of red brick with cast-iron details, its lobby a museum-quality preservation of early Nevada prosperity — pressed tin ceiling, dark wood bar, original brass fixtures. The rooms have been renovated without being sanitized; they feel inhabited rather than curated. The bar serves cocktails in a room where miners who just struck silver came to celebrate, and the bartender who serves you is likely the kind of person who can tell you exactly where the Lady in Red — the ghost said to haunt the hotel’s fifth floor — has most recently been spotted, with complete seriousness.

The Tonopah Stargazing Park, established at the south end of town, is one of the designated dark-sky sites in Nevada’s growing constellation of them. The park sits at 1,800 meters elevation and, crucially, surrounded by hundreds of miles of uninhabited desert in every direction, so there is almost no light pollution of any kind. On the night I went, the Milky Way was not a stripe but a physical presence — a thick band of light with visible depth and texture, the core of the galaxy directly overhead, the dark dust lanes cutting through it in patterns I’d only seen in photographs. I have seen the night sky from the Atacama and from the Australian outback, and Tonopah holds its own.

The Tonopah Mining Park, spread across the site of the original Jim Butler strike on the hill above town, has a self-guided trail through a landscape of rusted headframes, open mine shafts, and ore processing equipment. Some of the machinery is a century old and showing it; the wood of the headframes has gone grey and dry, and the sheet metal of the processing buildings has pulled away from its rivets in the desert wind. But the views from the hill — across the valley to the mountains on all sides — are the kind of views that explain why someone would build a city here in the middle of the Nevada desert when the ore was promising enough.

When to go: Spring and fall offer the best conditions — mild temperatures for driving US-50 and clear skies for stargazing. Summer is warm but manageable at this elevation (Tonopah sits at 1,800 meters). The Mizpah fills up for major meteor showers; book ahead for the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December, when the dark-sky tourism crowd arrives in force.