[Editor’s Note: This article was written by Huntington Press editor and former Nevada guidebook writer Deke Castleman a couple of years ago. With all the attention on Rachel these days over the uncertainty of the so-called Alienstock festival, we thought we’d throw out the mothballs, dust it off, and bring it back into the light […]
Posts in category Greater Vegas
Greater Vegas — the Soul of Carson City
What is it about godforsaken patches of the Nevada desert that give men visions of booming metropolises? It’s hard to say. Myron Lake bought a collapsed bridge and proceeded to found the world’s biggest little city. Don Laughlin bought a bankrupt bait shop and built, in a few short years, one of the largest gambling […]
Greater Vegas — Stewart Indian School
One of the highlights of Carson City, the Nevada state capital, is a visit to the Stewart Indian School. Thirty full years after the complete dislocation of Nevada’s Native population, the U.S. Senator from Nevada, William Stewart, acquired federal funds to open this school in 1890 on a 240-acre campus south of the town. At […]
Greater Vegas — Thousands of Pronghorn? In Neva...
Pronghorrn are unique for a number of reasons. They’re not related to antelope, deer, elk, caribou, sheep, or goat. The resolution of their eyes, extremely wide-set, as big as an elephant’s, and sharp, has been compared to eight-power binoculars. But mainly, these graceful creatures are fast. Pronghorn are the fastest land animal on the continent. They […]
Greater Vegas—Lehman Caves Part 2
Park naturalists take you and up to 19 other visitors into the Lehman Cave complex at Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, 300 miles northeast of Vegas. The 60- to 90-minute tours ($8, $10) take place every day of the year except holidays and let me tell you, this is an excursion to the inside — inside […]
Greater Vegas — Lehman Caves Part 1
In a previous blog, I described the ancient bristlecone pines that inhabit the upper reaches of Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. But neither these beautiful trees, nor Wheeler Peak (pictured below), second highest in Nevada at 13,065 feet, are the main attraction at Great Basin. That accolade belongs to Lehman Caves. For those […]
Greater Vegas—State of Illusion Final
Bringing the Nevada-illusion theme back to Las Vegas in the present day for this fourth and final part of the series, we have casino gambling, an industry based, primarily, on smoke and mirrors. Though it’s touted as a benign form of indoor recreation, the price of admission gets higher year by year: what with resort […]
Greater Vegas—The Illusion State 3
In the Illusion State Part 2, I introduced the Sazerac Lying Club, a fictitious group of barroom storytellers in the tradition of taproom raconteurs everywhere for all time — in this case in 1870s’ Austin, Nevada. The whole thing was a flight of fancy from the dying boomtown’s newspaper editor who needed some text to […]
Greater Vegas—The Illusion State 2
In my last blog, I described Greater Vegas as an illusion, built on a foundation of falsehood and fantasy. This isn’t my own idea; it’s an outgrowth (indirect as it might be) from a long tradition of journalism in the American west, which incorporated elements of exaggeration, satire, ribaldry, and just plain fiction to fill […]
Greater Vegas—The Illusion State
I’ve been a Nevada resident for 30 years, written numerous books about the Silver State, and am more at home here than in the other six places on two continents where I’ve lived, so I feel I’m qualified to say that no other state in this (currently dubious) union is built on more of a […]
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