Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/157485
"If you're ever thirsty out here you can crack one of those over a rock and get at some water," Replogle says, nodding his Stetson toward a barrel cactus at the side of the trail. Water isn't all that men and women thirst for in Nevada. A quest for gold has tempted many to the edge of avarice. On a brisk afternoon, with purplish clouds gathering over the desert, I explore the ruins of Rhyolite, one of dozens of gold-mining ghost towns found in the state. Tucked into a shallow valley just off Hwy. 374, two-and-a-half hours northwest of Vegas, this relic sits like an abandoned movie set overlooking a pitiless landscape. It's an eerie place; window openings stare out from roofless buildings like empty eye sockets, and there is a pervasive, musty smell of memories. In 1908, however, 8,000 people lived here, making Rhyolite the state's third largest city of the time, with banks, hardware stores, bawdy houses, saloons and a station house for the long-defunct Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. I leave Rhyolite and head down the road to Beatty, the self-proclaimed gateway 32 G O I N G P L A C E S p28-33_Nevada.indd 32 >> to Death Valley. Here the tenacious spirit of a mining town is still alive. Beatty is also uncomfortably close to that mysterious, off-limits zone known as the Nevada Test Site, where up until the early 1990s the military detonated hundreds of atomic bombs. At the Beatty Museum, I check out an old hazmat suit, tattered and not exactly confidence-inspiring. That night I sidle up to the Sourdough Saloon as a guest of the Beatty Historical Society, its members outfitted in 19th-century period costume. As I stare down a steak as big as a Frisbee, Joannie Jarvis, a fifth-generation Nevadan looking ravishing in an Edwardian-era dress, pulls up a stool next to me and shares her love of small-town life. "I have no desire to move to Vegas. I mean this is a mining town and it's boom and bust. That's just the way it is," says Jarvis. Nevada, fiercely independent and gregarious, has a way of sinking its teeth into the soul. Nevada also sunk its incisors into the thousands of workers who built the Hoover Dam, many of whom spent their paycheques in the casinos of Las Vegas, or as Tourists in Las Vegas gather to watch the Bellagio fountains dance. my Mexican-born bus driver calls it with an odd fondness, the City of Lost Wages. My palms sweat as I look tentatively over the barricade atop the Hoover and down the sweep of butter-smooth concrete plunging more than 200 metres to the sparkling Colorado River below. With butterflies in my stomach, I walk to the visitor centre, where I meet my guide, Jeff Tilton, beneath a sign warning claustrophobics not to enter. I follow him into the labyrinthine belly of this concrete beast. fa l l 2 0 1 3 13-08-14 1:28 PM