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It rarely gets as hot as 120 unless you’re down near sea level, say, near Death Valley (like Beatty), or you’re in an urban area with all that blacktop. Out in the brush, 110F would be pretty hot, and the relative humidity would be under 10%.

When the humidity is 20% and lower, you don’t need A/C to cool a house. All you need is evaporating water. Swamp coolers are quite common in Nevada. You drip water onto a sponge-like mat and blow air across it. At 5% relative humidity, air goes in at 110F and comes out the other side at about 70F, but now at higher humidity. You blow that air through your house and out, being replaced by new air coming in through the swamp cooler. No problem. Much more pleasant than AC, actually. Some houses don’t even have swamp coolers — the older Mormon ranches have thick stone walls, since there wasn’t a lot of lumber for building materials. Some of these stone walls are 16 to 20” thick, and they can keep a house pretty cool in the summer. Many of these places have trees shading the house too — cottonwoods planted 50 to 100+ years ago.

Most ranchers are working outside most of the time, tho, so air conditioning isn’t an issue. Just get your shirt or hat wet and you’re pretty comfortable. Sure, in the very hottest days of the year, say, from the second week of July to the second week of August, you might only work outside from dawn to about 10:30 or 11:00 am, then shade up until about 4:00pm or so. Not a problem.

Some of the old Mormon ranches in Nevada have houses with walls built of stone — sometimes 2’ thick. There wasn’t an abundance of lumber around these parts. Stone walls keep a house pretty cool in summer.

Attraction of living in rural Nevada? Same attraction of living on any ranch in the west. Ranches don’t all look like the yuppie palaces of Montana or Jackson Hole. Nevada has hotter summers, places like Wyoming or North Dakota have colder winters (like down to -40F). Texas has humidity as well as heat; in return, Texas has better pastures. It’s just a coin flip which you prefer. As long as you’re running 300 or more cows, you can make many of these places pencil out. Nevada probably has more places off the grid, because 87% of all land in Nevada is controlled by the federal government (quite incompetently, I would add). As a result, there are many ranches completely locked in by BLM land and there will never be a town rising up around them to make it worthwhile to install power or other utility infrastructure.