Over the past century, the Bureau of Land Management, the federal department of leftover land, inherited control of the Basin and Range region, while the Forest Service and multiple other agencies grabbed the trees, mountainsides, and crests. Together they own 84.9 percent of Nevada.
If you don’t know this country from experience, you should watch the Oscar-winning Nomadland. In between the pieces of story line, it features acres and vistas of western landscape, and it stars the underclass of people who did not cash in on the dot-com boom—who instead washed to the edges of our society, wandering the high desert in vans and temp jobs, working the Christmas rush at the Amazon fulfillment center in Reno-Sparks (called Empire in the film).
The film’s director of photography, Joshua James Richards, born in England, becomes a kind of poster boy for our journey. A New Yorker piece says: “He wanted to go to America to find out how the story of the Western expansion ends.”
If you start at the California border and drive right across the heart of Nevada, you’ll follow U.S. Route 50. About 35 years ago, Life magazine christened it “the Loneliest Road in America,” and the state’s tourism board turned that phrase into marketing gold.
In 1913, the road was part of the first transcontinental motor route. Extending from San Francisco to Times Square, it was known then as the Lincoln Highway. It’s not so lonely at first, cutting past casinos along the southeast shore of Lake Tahoe before diving down the east side of the Sierra to Carson City, the state capital. And the next 40 miles east is a mélange of straggling suburbs, brothels, and scattered
