Tonopah

We reached Tonopah after four hours on US-95, a road so empty that passing another car felt like an event. The town rises suddenly out of the sagebrush basin, its hillsides scarred with old mine tailings and rusted headframes from a silver rush that, for a few wild years after 1900, made Tonopah one of the richest towns in America. Lia had booked us into the Mizpah Hotel, a five-story brick relic locals insist is haunted by a miner’s mistress murdered on the third floor, and the bartender greeted us with the casual line, “you’ll probably hear something tonight.” We laughed it off. Neither of us slept particularly well.

Walking the mining park

By day we explored the Tonopah Historic Mining Park, a sprawling open-air museum built right on top of the old Mizpah and Silver Top mine claims, where boardwalks wind past collapsed headframes, ore cars, and shafts plunging into blackness behind chain-link. A retired miner running the small museum showed us chunks of ore still glinting with silver and told stories of the boomtown days when Tonopah briefly outpaced Reno in population and ambition. Standing at the rim of the open pit with the wind picking up dust across the valley, it was easy to picture the frantic energy of 1905 laid over the town’s current, near-total stillness.

The darkest sky we’d ever seen

Nevada’s isolation, so inconvenient for driving, turns out to be a gift after dark. We drove a few miles outside town, cut the headlights, and stood in a silence so complete we could hear our own pulse. The Milky Way arced overhead in a band thick enough to look solid, and Tonopah’s astronomers-in-residence — the town hosts a small stargazing park — pointed a telescope at Saturn’s rings for us, free of charge, just because we’d wandered over and asked. Someone mentioned the Extraterrestrial Highway and Area 51 lay not so far to the southeast, and under a sky like that, it didn’t feel like a joke.

Getting There

Tonopah sits almost exactly halfway between Las Vegas and Reno on US-95, roughly a three-and-a-half-hour drive from either city, which makes it a natural overnight stop for anyone crossing the state. There is a small local airstrip but no commercial service, so a car is the only practical way in. Fill the tank before you leave — gas stations thin out fast on both sides of town, and cell coverage disappears for long stretches of the drive.