Caliente

Caliente sits wedged into Meadow Valley Wash, a canyon so narrow that the Union Pacific tracks, the highway, and the town itself all have to share the same thin ribbon of flat ground. We arrived from Pioche on a two-lane road that dropped down through red rock walls, and the first thing that came into view was the town’s Mission Revival train depot, an unexpectedly grand building — Spanish tile roof, arched windows — for a place with barely a thousand residents. It was built in 1923 by the railroad partly to placate townsfolk furious that the original depot had burned, and it still functions today as Caliente’s city hall, library, and unofficial living room all at once.

The depot and a town built by rail

We wandered through the depot in the late afternoon, its cool tile floors and thick adobe-style walls a relief from the canyon heat outside, while a volunteer explained how the whole town exists because the railroad needed a maintenance and water stop between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. Caliente’s name — Spanish for “hot” — comes from the thermal springs nearby, and the depot’s Mission Revival style was meant to evoke exactly that desert warmth, a rare bit of architectural ambition this far from anywhere.

Soaking as the freight trains pass

A few miles outside town, a small hot springs resort channels natural geothermal water into a couple of soaking pools, and Lia and I had one nearly to ourselves as the sun dropped behind the canyon rim. Every twenty minutes or so a Union Pacific freight train rumbled through the valley below, headlights sweeping the red rock walls and the horn echoing off stone long after the train itself had passed. It’s an odd, oddly perfect soundtrack — industrial and ancient at the same time — for soaking in water that’s been rising out of this ground for millennia.

Getting There

Caliente is on US-93, about two hours north of Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), and roughly 25 minutes south of Pioche if you’re combining the two. There’s no public transit this deep into eastern Nevada, so a car is essential — but the drive down Meadow Valley Wash, canyon walls closing in tight around the road, is a memorable arrival in its own right.