The Real Nevada by Gregory McNamee

Bring up the sovereign state of Nevada in a room full of easterners, and the odds are good that you'll strike up reminiscences of Las Vegas, Reno, and Tahoe, of fortunes almost won and fortunes always lost, of glitter-spangled performances and Elvis's worst hours. You'll hear tales of casino facades studded with a million light bulbs apiece (and that devour electricity drawn from power grids throughout the intermountain West), of $3.95 all-you-can-eat prime rib meals, of Meyer Lansky and Pia Zadora, of white tigers imprisoned before thousands of staring eyes.

Well, just as France is not Paris, Nevada is not an endless palace of sin and lost wages. Lying in what has been called America's Empty Quarter, it enjoys one of the lowest population densities in the contiguous United States, and vast stretches of Nevada are all but free of humans. Drive the width of the state along US 50 from Baker to Carson City and you'll quickly appreciate why an Australian journalist dubbed it, some years back, "the loneliest highway in the world." And this from a man who has seen more than his share of the outback.

Forty-eight million acres of Nevada's unsettled lands are under federal protection of one sort or another. Some of the more unfortunate acreage is used for target practice, the skies above it resounding with the chainsaw buzz of Air Force F-16s and A-10s; until recently, other patches of desert were seen fit to use for underground thermonuclear-weapons tests. But in the main, then as now, Nevada's land remains more or less wild, the home of jackrabbits and scorpions, a fastness of windswept mountain ranges and ancient stands of bristlecone pines and creosote bush.

A paradise for wilderness lovers and desert rats, much of Nevada is little changed from the days when John Muir roamed its peaks and valleys, more than a century ago: The entire state seems to be pretty evenly divided into mountain ranges covered with nut pines and plains covered with sage—now a swath of pines stretching from north to south, now a swath of sage; the one black, the other gray; one severely level, the other sweeping on complacently over ridge and valley and lofty crowning dome. Geologists, as Muir anticipated, describe Nevada as a "basin-and-range province," marked by northwest-to-southeast-tending mountain chains interspersed with broad valleys through which, in good times, rivers flow.

Head along any winding state or federal highway and the lay of the land immediately becomes apparent. What you may not expect, miles away now in any direction from the click of the roulette wheel and the chink of coins falling irretrievably into slot machines, are the vastness, silences, distances, remoteness, and solitude. There, in a world of weird dunes, timeless canyons, deep forests, and towering mountains, lies the real Nevada.