The Ruby Mountains: Nevada's Alps

About thirty miles southeast of Elko, the Ruby Mountains rise so abruptly from the desert floor that travelers who see them for the first time compare them to the Alps. The comparison has been common enough for long enough that people now call the range the Swiss Alps of Nevada, and visitors who expect the Great Basin to be uniformly flat and dry are startled by what they find inside the canyon that cuts into the mountain core.

Lamoille Canyon is a valley with broad, flat walls carved by glaciers during the last ice age, its sides rising nearly three thousand feet above the canyon floor and exposing layers of granite and metamorphic rock hundreds of millions of years old. A paved road designated a National Scenic Byway follows the canyon for twelve miles, climbing through aspen groves, past a rushing stream, and up to an elevation of about eight thousand eight hundred feet at a parking area near the head of the glacier-carved bowl. From there, trails continue into the wilderness above.

The Ruby Mountains reach a high point of eleven thousand three hundred eighty-seven feet at Ruby Dome and contain more than twenty-five alpine lakes and fifty peaks above ten thousand feet. The Lamoille Canyon road is generally accessible from late spring through October. In summer the canyon is dense with wildflowers, and mule deer browse at the edges of the aspen groves. It is one of those Nevada secrets that the state's own residents often discover only when they have company coming and want to show off the landscape they take for granted.