We handed this question off to Deke Castleman, our greater Nevada expert. Here’s his report.
The 70-foot-tall cottonwood you refer to is found at a wide spot on US 50 near the old Pony Express stop at Middlegate Station, 60 miles east of Fallon. Believe it or not (and you’ll probably believe it), it’s known as the Shoe Tree.
From a distance, you can’t really tell what it is. As you get closer, it looks like a lone tree in the desert filled to the rafters with bats and, closer still, birds of all shapes and colors, many on top of one another. Finally, you recognize the shapes and colors as footwear -- every kind, from bedroom slippers to rollerblades, from cowboy boots to high heels, from Birkenstocks to Manolo Blahniks. Most are strung up with shoelaces, though some are held together with bras and underwear. Soda bottles, American flags, dollar bills, and the last time I drove by, even a stuffed partridge, all inhabit the poor cottonwood. Plenty more, along with typical roadside trash, litter the desert around the tree.
According to the locals (meaning the barflies at Middle Gate Station, a nearby bar), no one really knows how the Shoe Tree got its start, though it’s said that shoes have been thrown into the tree since the 1980s. One legend has it that a couple on their way to getting married stopped to rest by the tree, removing their shoes and socks to let their dogs breathe. They got into some kind of disagreement and the woman grabbed her fiance’s shoes, tied the laces together, threw them into the tree, then drove off. The women tend to believe that one.
Another version has it that the woman, shoeless, began to get cold feet over the wedding and her fiance threw her shoes in the tree so she couldn’t walk away. The men tend to believe that one, though what woman takes only one pair of shoes to her wedding?
Kevin Fagan, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, drove by once and got interested in this and other shoes trees, eventually identifying similar ones in Arizona, Arkansas, and Indiana, but he believes that Nevada’s is the tallest tree with the most shoes.
