The Loneliest Road in America

The main street running through Ely is also a transcontinental road. United States Highway Fifty through Nevada follows the alignment of the Lincoln Highway, the first road designed to carry automobiles from one coast of the United States to the other. The Lincoln Highway was formally dedicated in nineteen thirteen by a national association of road advocates who believed the country needed a single continuous route from New York to San Francisco. The Nevada segment, one of the most demanding stretches, crossed the high desert between Ely and Reno through terrain where towns were separated by dozens of empty miles.

In the summer of nineteen eighty-six, Life magazine published a description of United States Highway Fifty in Nevada and called it the Loneliest Road in America, warning that travelers needed survival skills and a sense of humor to drive it. The Nevada Commission on Tourism did not take offense. They embraced the label, printed official Loneliest Road driver passports that could be stamped at towns along the route, and turned a magazine insult into one of the more successful tourism campaigns in the state's history.

Motorcyclists and road trippers who drive the highway through Ely today are following a corridor that has been carrying travelers across the Great Basin for over a century, from the wagon-and-horse era of the Lincoln Highway's early years through the automotive age. The towns along the route are widely spaced, the sky is enormous, and the emptiness, which Life meant as a warning, turns out to be the point.