The Loneliest Road, Pony Express to US-50

In July nineteen eighty-six, Life magazine published a travel feature about United States Route Fifty across Nevada that called it the loneliest road in America and suggested no traveler should attempt it without survival skills and considerable faith. The editors meant it as a warning. Nevada's tourism bureau turned it into a tagline.

The road they were talking about runs east from Fallon through the basin-and-range country to Ely, and from Ely south and east to the Utah border. It crosses several mountain ranges and dips into valleys between them, passing through towns that exist as postal addresses and collections of buildings rather than functioning communities. Forty miles or more can separate services.

But the road is old in ways that the Life magazine framing did not acknowledge. What became Route Fifty follows, almost exactly, the corridor of the Pony Express, which operated from April eighteen sixty to October eighteen sixty-one. In eighteen months of operation, Pony Express riders carried mail nearly two thousand miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, crossing the Great Basin on horseback relays with stations roughly ten to fifteen miles apart. The telegraph killed the Pony Express within days of its transcontinental completion; the express had survived just long enough to demonstrate that the continent could be crossed quickly, before a faster technology made the demonstration moot.

Before the Pony Express, the Central Overland Stage ran the same corridor. After the Pony Express, the Lincoln Highway followed it. What is now Route Fifty is a palimpsest, a road that has been used by every generation of people crossing the Great Basin since the Newe first wore paths between springs. Baker is one of the last services before the Utah line. The road to Baker turns south off Route Fifty about five miles north of town, and the park road heads west from Baker.