Wells: High Desert Junction

Wells, Nevada occupies a narrow slot in the landscape where several valleys and mountain ranges converge. The Humboldt River valley arrives from the west, opening into a wide lowland near the town. The East Humboldt Range rises to the south, its glacier-carved ridgeline reaching nearly eleven thousand feet and visible from the interstate as a dramatic wall of pale granite above the sage flats. To the northeast, the lower Pequop Mountains mark the transition toward the high desert of northeastern Nevada and the Great Salt Lake basin beyond.

The town sits at about five thousand six hundred feet above sea level, far enough into the Great Basin that winters can be genuinely harsh and summers can oscillate between heat and afternoon thunderstorms that build against the mountains and light the valley with lightning at dusk. It is a small city on a large stage: a community of a few thousand people serving as a commercial center for ranches and resource operations spread across thousands of square miles of federal land.

Wells grew up around a water stop on the Central Pacific Railroad in eighteen sixty-nine, one in a series of desert stations the railroad established across northern Nevada. The name came from the wells that emigrants had long used in the valley floor, which was itself a reason people had been stopping here for years before the railroad arrived. Tens of thousands of westbound settlers traveled through this valley in the eighteen forties and fifties, and Wells was already a recognized waypoint before anyone built a permanent structure here.

Today Wells is known to travelers on Interstate Eighty as a fuel stop between Salt Lake City and Elko, which is accurate but incomplete. Just south of town, a canyon road climbs into the East Humboldt Range to Angel Lake, one of the most dramatic alpine lakes in Nevada. Twelve miles northwest, the ruins of Metropolis stand in the sage, the remains of a planned city that rose and fell within fifteen years. And in two thousand eight, Wells was the epicenter of a magnitude six earthquake that damaged much of the town, a reminder that the Great Basin is an active landscape, not a settled one.