6 Bucket-List Small Towns In Nevada
Volunteers in Genoa have been making candy by the ton since 1919 to keep the town's streetlights burning. The fundraiser they invented now pulls more than 400 vendors into a community of 1,343 people. Virginia City guards an inheritance of its own, a Victorian hillside paid for with Comstock silver. Elko gives January over to cowboy poets and July over to Basque dancers, while Bristlecone pines grow above Mount Charleston in snow near 12,000 feet. Each of the six towns below earns a place on a Nevada bucket list.
Genoa
Mormon Station went up in 1851 as a supply stop for wagon trains about to attempt the Sierra crossing, and the settlement that grew around it became the oldest permanent non-native town in Nevada. Orson Hyde renamed the place Genoa in 1855, after the Italian city. The town sits on the western edge of the Carson Valley, seven miles northwest of Minden, with the Carson Range rising directly behind it. The 2020 count put the population at 1,343. The Genoa Bar has poured drinks since 1853, which makes it the oldest saloon in the state. Snowshoe Thompson, who carried mail on skis over the Sierra through the winters of the 1850s and 1860s, is buried in the cemetery north of town on Jacks Valley Road.
A fire swept Genoa in 1910 and took what was left of the original trading post, so the stockade standing in Mormon Station State Historic Park today is a reconstruction begun in 1947. Inside is a museum of pioneer-era artifacts, and the grounds include the 1856 Kinsey House and a half-mile interpretive path through the site's first century. The surrounding historic district still reads as a pre-statehood town, which is useful context for anyone tracing Nevada back past its 1864 admission to the Union. The Candy Dance is the year's big event. It started in 1919 as a fundraiser to buy street lights, and it now brings more than 400 vendors into town on the last full weekend of September.
Incline Village
The name predates the town by eighty years. A steam-powered cable tramway called the Great Incline was finished in 1880 to haul cordwood 1,800 feet up the Carson Range for the Comstock mines, and the label stuck to the shoreline below it. The community itself is modern. The Crystal Bay Development Company bought roughly 9,000 acres from George Whittell in the late 1950s and subdivided the land into residential lots. Washoe County created the Incline Village General Improvement District in 1961 to provide water, sewer, and recreation services. Today, about 9,500 people live on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, with the Diamond Peak ski area inside town limits and Sand Harbor a few minutes down State Route 28.
Sand Harbor belongs to Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park, and its boulder-strewn coves fill early on summer weekends. Hidden Beach, just up the highway, takes the overflow. The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival stages its season on the sand at Sand Harbor, and in July the Brubeck Jazz Summit runs on the University of Nevada, Reno campus at Lake Tahoe. December belongs to the Northern Lights Festival, a month of lighting displays, markets and concerts organized by the local business association. Dinner is worth planning around at Big Water Grille on Ski Way, open since 1998 and set high enough to put the lake in the window.
Minden
Minden was drawn on paper before it was built. The Dangberg family, German immigrants who had ranched the Carson Valley since 1857, donated land for the southern terminus of the Virginia and Truckee Railway and had the town plat approved in July 1906. They named it for Minden in Westphalia, near where the elder H. F. Dangberg was born. The town took the Douglas County seat from Genoa in 1916 and now holds about 3,400 residents. The valley floor sits near 4,700 feet, which means hot, dry summers and winter nights well below freezing rather than the mild desert winter the elevation is often assumed to bring.
Pilots know the town for reasons unrelated to ranching. The Sierra wave that forms over the Carson Valley makes Minden-Tahoe Airport one of the premier soaring sites in North America, and gliders towed out of the field have set distance and altitude records. The airport hosts SkyFest each October, an airshow that was formerly known as the Aviation Roundup. Downtown holds the 1912 CVIC Hall and the bandstand in Minden Park. Schat's Bakery and Restaurant handles the pastry side of Main Street, with Minden Meat and Deli, the Pink Rose Boutique and an antique store in the 1909 blacksmith shop filling out the block. Two miles west on Highway 88, the Dangberg Home Ranch Historic Park preserves the family's actual buildings rather than a reconstruction. They went up between 1857 and 1917, and the house tours run by reservation.
Virginia City
The 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode turned a hillside on Mount Davidson into one of the richest places on earth. Virginia City held roughly 25,000 people at its peak in the mid-1870s and holds 787 today, at an elevation of around 6,200 feet. In 1961, the federal government designated the whole area a National Historic Landmark District, one of only six in Nevada. It includes Gold Hill, Silver City, and Dayton alongside Virginia City itself. The boardwalks along C Street are the obvious place to start walking.
The Great Fire of 1875 burned most of the town, so the landmarks people come for are the rebuilt ones. The Fourth Ward School opened in 1876, a four-story mansard-roofed building that held classes until 1936 and now runs as a museum. St. Mary's in the Mountains replaced its 1868 church on the same site in 1876 and 1877, and it still holds services. Silver Terrace Cemetery steps down the slope in fenced terraces divided by fraternal orders. Samuel Clemens was writing for the Territorial Enterprise here in 1863 when he first signed a story Mark Twain, and Piper's Opera House on B Street still books performances. In March, the town runs the Rocky Mountain Oyster Fry alongside its St. Patrick's Day parade, and the International Camel and Ostrich Races take over in September.
Mount Charleston
Bristlecone pines grow on the ridges above this town, some of them older than anything else living in the state. Charleston Peak tops out at 11,916 feet as the high point of the Spring Mountains, and the 314 residents of Mount Charleston live in Kyle Canyon well up its flank. Congress established the 317,000-acre Spring Mountains National Recreation Area around them in 1993. The drive is about 35 miles northwest of Las Vegas by way of US 95 and State Route 157, and the temperature drops roughly thirty degrees along the way. Summer hikers, winter snowshoers and the occasional climbing party all use the same trailheads.
The Spring Mountains Visitor Gateway is the best first stop: a 128-acre complex built on a reclaimed golf course, with the visitor center open daily at 9 a.m. Its Seven Stones Plaza honors the seven Southern Paiute tribes who hold the range as a creation place, and the grounds also hold the Silent Heroes of the Cold War Memorial, the first national memorial of its kind. Trails depart from the parking area for all ability levels, including the accessible Acastus Trail. The Kyle Canyon Picnic Area offers 25 first-come sites along the wash, and the Mount Charleston Wilderness beyond it carries the north and south routes to the summit.
Elko
Elko began in 1868 as a Central Pacific railroad town and never stopped working. About 20,600 people live here now, which makes it the largest community for well over a hundred miles in any direction. The Humboldt River runs straight through the middle of town. The Ruby Mountains stand about twenty miles southeast, with the Lamoille Canyon Scenic Byway climbing twelve miles into glacial terrain that holds more than twenty alpine lakes. Winters are genuinely cold, and summers run hot and dry, so hiking and fishing seasons here are short and worth timing.
The Western Folklife Center occupies the old Pioneer Hotel downtown, mahogany saloon bar included, and since 1985 it has produced the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering each winter. Congress gave the event its national designation in 2000, and for a week the ranch country empties into town for poetry, music, gear-making workshops and dancing. July brings the National Basque Festival, a legacy of the sheepherding families who settled northeastern Nevada, and the Star Hotel still serves Basque dinners family style. Hot air balloons fill the sky over the Ruby Mountain Balloon Festival each September. Stockmen's and the Gold Dust West cover the gaming, and the California Trail Interpretive Center west of town explains what the emigrant wagons faced across the Humboldt Sink.
Which Town Fits The Trip
The six divide fairly neatly. Genoa and Virginia City are the history stops, one holding the state's pre-territorial beginnings and the other the silver strike that paid for so much of what followed. Minden and Elko run on working agriculture, with ranch families and a rodeo calendar behind the storefronts. Incline Village and Mount Charleston trade the valley floor for elevation, alpine water in one case and bristlecone forest in the other. The calendar decides as much as geography does. The Candy Dance falls on the last full weekend of September, the Cowboy Poetry Gathering lands in winter, and SkyFest belongs to October.
