Elko

Elko sits in a broad northeastern Nevada valley that most people only see from I-80 at seventy miles an hour, but Lia and I got off the highway on the recommendation of a stranger in a Salt Lake City diner who told us, flatly, “you have to eat Basque there.” She was right in a way that reshaped the whole trip.

A Basque dinner, family style

Basque immigrants came to this stretch of Nevada in the late 1800s to herd sheep across the open range, and their boardinghouses evolved into the Basque restaurants that still define Elko’s food scene today. We sat down at a long communal table at one of the town’s oldest, and the meal arrived in waves without much choice involved: a pitcher of Picon punch, a tureen of soup, a platter of lamb stew, and a whole roast chicken, all meant to be shared down the table with whoever else happened to be seated there that night — in our case, a rancher’s family celebrating a birthday. It’s a tradition that started as feeding hungry sheepherders cheaply and became, somehow, one of the great regional cuisines of the American West.

Lamoille Canyon and the Ruby Mountains

The next morning we drove twenty minutes southeast to Lamoille Canyon, a glacially carved gorge cutting deep into the Ruby Mountains, a range so improbably jagged and snow-capped rising out of the sagebrush that early cartographers assumed the peaks held actual rubies (it was garnet). We hiked a few miles up the canyon floor past waterfalls and aspen groves, the granite walls closing in on either side, and understood immediately why backcountry skiers fly in from across the country for the Rubies’ famous heli-skiing terrain in winter.

Cowboy culture and the Western Folklife Center

Back in town, Elko’s other great cultural export is cowboy poetry — the Western Folklife Center hosts the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering every January, drawing working ranch hands from across the West to recite verse about cattle drives and open range in a tradition that’s kept oral cowboy culture alive since 1985. We weren’t there in gathering season, but the center’s small museum and archive of recorded poetry and music gave us a real feel for a culture that still quietly runs this part of Nevada, ranch trucks and all, outside the mining and casino economy most travelers associate with the state.

Getting There

Elko Regional Airport has direct flights from Salt Lake City, making it an easy connection for a quick visit. By road, Elko sits directly on I-80, about four hours east of Reno and three and a half hours west of Salt Lake City, a drive across open range and high desert that makes the sudden rise of the Ruby Mountains all the more dramatic. A car is necessary for reaching Lamoille Canyon, though downtown Elko and its Basque restaurants are easily walkable.