The Ruby Mountains: Nevada's Alps That Nobody Visits

The Ruby Mountains in northeastern Nevada have almost no name recognition outside the state, which is one of the things that makes them remarkable. They are a genuine alpine range. Ruby Dome, the high point, reaches eleven thousand three hundred eighty-seven feet. The range was heavily carved by glaciers during the recent ice ages. The terrain above eight thousand feet includes glacially carved cirques, alpine lakes, and a backcountry that sees a fraction of the traffic comparable terrain in Colorado or Wyoming would receive.

The range is administered as a unit of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, and the Ruby Mountain Wilderness covers ninety thousand acres of the highest terrain. The Lamoille Canyon road, called the Alps Drive by the Forest Service, cuts into the range from the town of Elko to the east and provides access to a landscape that most visitors to Nevada have no idea exists.

Elko, at the base of the mountains, is a Basque ranching community. Basque immigrants arrived in Nevada in the late nineteenth century to work as sheepherders in the Great Basin's high-desert pastures, and a distinct Basque-American community has persisted in Elko ever since, centered on the National Basque Festival held there annually. The sheepherders who worked the high country of the Rubies left carvings on aspen trees throughout the backcountry, arborglyphs documenting names, dates, and images dating to the eighteen eighties.

The Ruby Mountains are the kind of place that exists in plain sight without registering. You can drive Interstate Eighty past Elko and see the range to the south the entire time without knowing that what you are looking at is one of the better wilderness experiences in the Great Basin.