Ely: Isolated City of the Great Basin

Ely, Nevada is one of the most isolated small cities in the United States. Draw a circle on a map centered here: Las Vegas is about two hundred fifty miles to the south. Salt Lake City is about two hundred forty miles to the east. Reno is more than two hundred miles to the west. The state capital is nearly three hundred miles away. Ely exists, as so many Nevada towns do, because of what was in the ground: copper, in the hills southwest of town, found in the early nineteen hundreds and extracted in quantities that built a company town from scratch on the empty floor of the Steptoe Valley.

But Ely is also, and has long been, the hub of White Pine County, a county larger than some New England states, serving as the commercial and government center for an enormous territory of ranches, small mines, and federal land. The rhythm of the town's economy has varied with the price of copper over a century, with booms and layoffs the community absorbed and kept going. The old downtown, with the Hotel Nevada still rising above the main street and the Nevada Northern Railway yards intact to the east, gives Ely the texture of a working western town that has not been polished for tourism but rewards anyone who stops long enough to look.

What surrounds Ely is worth the looking. To the east, the Snake Range rises to Wheeler Peak, the second highest summit in Nevada at thirteen thousand and sixty-three feet, sheltering Lehman Caves, a limestone cavern of rare formation richness that became the heart of Great Basin National Park in nineteen eighty-six. South of town, six massive stone beehive kilns built in the eighteen seventies stand remarkably intact in a canyon, monuments to the industrial infrastructure of the silver mining era. The Lincoln Highway, first transcontinental automobile road in the United States, runs straight through the middle of town. And the Ruth copper pit, a few miles west, is one of the most dramatic open-pit mining landscapes in the country, a hole in the earth that resets the senses.