Lean In
I know US Highway 50 in Nevada is sometimes called “The Loneliest Road In America”, but if you ask me it’s not even the loneliest (major) road in Nevada. But then one of the places I’m from is Australia, and by Australian standards, US 50 is not any sort of lonely. And as the Wikipedia article linked-to above notes, US Highway 6 across Nevada is actually lonelier than US 50 in many ways (though I’m not sure how one measures “loneliness” in this context), and having driven both of them several times, I’d agree.
But in large parts of Nevada, Highway 50 really is pretty lonely, or at least out there in a pleasingly back-of-beyond sort of way. And it has some side roads that are (of course) even lonelier. This image comes from one of the more substantial of those side roads: Nevada Highway 722 between Austin, NV, and Middlegate, NV, a stretch of road I drive every now and then (and that actually used to be the route for Highway 50 until it was bypassed to the north).
Once you take Highway 722 by leaving US 50 a little west of Austin, there really isn’t much except … landscape … on either side of the two-lane blacktop you’re on.
And a few miles west of the start of Highway 722 there’s this building off to the right in the middle distance. I took several photos of it a decade ago at least, but didn’t like the results — the light was wrong, and I thought I’d be back a few days later to do it again properly. But it took a bunch of years to get back, and I just assumed the building would be truly flattened by now. But there it was — essentially unchanged, and this time the light was good (quite soft, and emphasising the pastels in ways I quite like), and my lenses were all available and working. So I stopped and took a bunch of photos; this is the one I like the most.
I have a bunch more photos I’ve taken over the years from Highway 722 that I’ll probably put up here some time — it’s one of my all-time fave desert back roads.
Postscript: I drove past this site early 2019, and the building’s gone.
