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We’re just east of the middle of the state.

Grab a map of Nevada that’s about the size of 1/2 of letter page.

Stab your finger down on where you think the exact center of the state is. Look to the right of where your finger is: that’s where we are: Diamond Valley. We’re what is called “high desert.” Hot days, cold nights. It isn’t uncommon to have 90F during the day, and 38F at night in early or late summer. In the hottest part of the summer, we get down to only 50F at night. Positively balmy.

Here in Nevada, there are lots of ranches and farms that are rather isolated — much more isolated than folks from back east call “rural.” Some of these ranches are off the grid; they have gensets and pump irrigation water with diesel engines at the wellhead. There are some who have some solar power installations. Some ranchers just get by without. They’re pretty much working the same way they did when Brigham Young sent forth the pioneers in 1849 to nail down land that had water. Those “pioneer” ranches don’t need to pump irrigation water; those early Mormon ranches were located where a stream or spring came out of the base of a mountain and the meadows were naturally irrigated.

There are roads, but you’re probably looking for something black. Most of the roads outside the urban counties in Nevada are packed dirt. They’re maintained by our county road crews twice a year, and you can tool along on them from 40 to 70 MPH, just spiffy.

Their mail? If they’re really isolated, they’ll be forced to drive into a town where their PO box is. They just rent a big PO box, so it can hold a couple weeks’ worth of mail.

Sometimes, they are on a “HCR” - “highway contract route”, where a US Mail contractor drives a route that includes a string of these ranches twice or three times a week. In this case, the boxes will be at the end of a road, or on a centrally located ranch, and neighboring ranches will drive to the collection of boxes. Sometimes neighbors trade off driving to town to get mail. When they get motivated and want to be paid for their fuel, they sign up to become a USPS contractor, the USPS designates the roads they drive as an HCR and there ya go: mail delivery to within 20 miles of your door. Addresses for some of these ranches look like this:

Big Hat Ranch
HCR 63211, Box 11
Austin, NV (zipcode)

The HCR 63211 is the contract #. The “Box” is the box along the route.

Stores? You drive into town. We have one grocery store in town here, but for big shopping, we drive 120 miles up to Elko. These ranchers will appear in town every other week or so. We’ve been in stores 300 miles away and run into neighbors from the next valley over, who are also “in town” shopping. Again, many of these ranches just do without. They’re raising beef, so meat is readily available. Even Angus cows give milk. They raise their own food on many of these ranches, and nail a deer/pronghorn or two come hunting season for variety.

Police department? They’re who shows up to protect the criminals. Rural Nevadans are armed to the teeth. Criminals who are stupid enough to do something out in the boonies here are usually very, very happy to see the sheriff’s deputies show up. It means that a) the deputies end the arguing between the husband and wife which gun from their collection they want to use to shoot the perp, b) the perp realizes he might live and c) the perp has reason to hope his body will be found even if he doesn’t live.

In general, rural Nevadans spend a fair bit of time on the road. The people in cities who advocate nonsense like “drive 55 MPH” are our biggest annoyance, because it takes a long time to get anywhere at 55MPH. City slickers think 55MPG is “high speed.” In general, the speed limits out here are 70 to 75MPH, and if you’re a local, on good terms with law enforcement, they won’t pull you over if you’re under 80 in a 70 zone, 85 in a 75 zone. If you’re under 85 and they pull you over, they might give you a ticket for “wasting natural resources” because the Feds want to see “X” so many tickets issued for speeding per quarter to maintain our highway funding.

Unless of course, you’re in a luxury car with California or Utah plates. Then you’d better keep to the speed limits, because you’re the preferred target vehicles on our roads.

That said, there are neighbors (ie, folks within a 100 mile radius) who I don’t see more than perhaps twice a year — once at the Independence Day parade/party, and once at the auto parts store Christmas party. They’re too busy to get off the ranch all that often.

Whatever you do, never, ever, ever speed through rural Nevada towns, where the limits will always be 25MPH, 15MPH in a school zone. If you do, you can expect to be busted and busted hard for speeding. There are kids, dogs and old ladies in the middle of these towns, and they’re used to having the right of way. If someone who is stopped for speeding through these small towns lips off to the LEO’s... well, Mr. Lippy is in for a long day. There ain’t much crime around here, and the sheriffs departments don’t have a lot to do. They just love people who lip off to cops. Breaks up their day.

As for your outbound flight: what you speak of is the difference between the “low desert” (Vegas) and the “high desert” (where we are). If you look at your map of Nevada, look for a road that runs (roughly) east/west that is US Route 6. South of this road is the low desert, north is the high desert. The road runs mostly at the bottom of the plateau where the high desert begins. If you drive US-6 from Tonopah to Lund, there are places where you can look to your right and see the low desert, and when you look left, you can literally see the sagebrush is a foot to two feet taller, and there are pinyon pine or juniper trees on your left, whereas on your right there is nothing but saltbrush, shade scale, low sagebrush and some very hardy grasses.