Left Reno this morning and headed down US 395 to Carson City to see the Nevada State Railroad Museum. Unfortunately...only open on Friday thru Monday, so all I got to see was what was outside. That included this guy chipping rust out of a part of a locomotive tender car:
Anyway, the museum looked pretty nice from the outside.
I headed east on US50, "The Loneliest Highway in America" and it pretty much lives up to its name. It's about 250 miles from Carson City to Eureka, NV, where I'm spending the night, and there is a whole lot of nothing in between. I think this is the "Great American Desert".
I stopped at Grimes Point, where there are a large number of Indian Petroglyphs carved on rocks in a big boulder field. This was a view from the west side of the boulder field looking west, to give you an idea of the setting:
This is one of the better shots I took of the petroglyphs themselves:
Not sure what it means, but according to the information at the site, the pertoglyphs date from 5000 BC to 1500 AD.
On towards Eureka there were vast stretches of nothingness. No trees, no houses, no Starbucks, not much of anything but low weeds and sagebrush. This'll give you some idea of what it looked like for the best part of 250 miles:
I got to Eureka around 3:00 and took a walk around the town. Eureka has been a boom town since the 1860's, with gold, silver, and now molybdenum being mined here. The Eureka Sentinel was the local paper that was published in this building until 1960:
The building now houses the town museum, and no, Mark Twain apparently didn't even stop for a beer here. The press room was interesting, though:
As you can see, pasted to the wall are a bunch of articles and old newspapers from almost a century of publication. I thought these were especially interesting:
If you look closely (enlarge the picture), you can see that these articles date from 1898 and the run-up to the Spanish-American War.
One more picture. This is the Eureka Opera House and the Jackson House Hotel and Saloon on Main Street:
Tomorrow, it's east on US50 to Salina, Utah and then to Grand Junction, Colorado on Thursday. Miles today: 278. Total to date: 9,779.
