From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Sun Feb 24 2002 - 22:31:30 MST
On 2/24/02 6:26 PM, "Spike Jones" <spike66@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Here's something that may surprise those who have never seen it:
> Nevada is one of the most scenic states in the lower 48. I would
> put it in the top 3. They never sell that much in their tourist
> brochures, only the gambling and legal harlotry.
For outdoor sportsman types, northern Nevada is frequently ranked as the top
spot in the U.S. just for the sheer concentration of outdoor activities
available. The Reno/Tahoe area does in fact capitalize on outdoor tourism
fairly aggressively. Within a one hour radius you can find superb examples
of just about every type of outdoor activity imaginable that doesn't require
an ocean. The natural scenery is also pretty spectacular in that area, with
Lake Tahoe in the high Sierra, and Pyramid Lake just up the road (Pyramid
Lake being a large, kind of eerie looking desert lake with weird rock
formations which most people would recognize because it is frequently the
backdrop for car commercials and similar). Guided hunting and fishing trips
are also big business for that region.
> But Nevada has
> much more to offer than that, so much more. If you ever see
> one of those pictures of the US from space, notice the area which
> is Nevada: mountain range after mountain range, like grand
> ripples on a massive sea.
Nevada technically has 314 mountain ranges, of which there are at least a
dozen and a half major ones, with peaks ranging from 8,000-12,000 feet on
average. The area behind the Sierra Nevada range (i.e. Nevada for the most
part) is the active crumple zone for the subduction of the Pacific plate. A
number of the ranges have sections that are extremely young (read: less than
1 million years old) even though they may rise several thousand feet above
the local valley floor, and this explains among other things as to why
virtually every spring below 5,000 feet is geothermally heated to some
extent or another in northern Nevada (a lot of water does come from above
5,000 feet, but that is typically snow pack stored in granite tectonic
aquifers).
My personal take on this is that I *like* the fact that the boonies of
Nevada are extremely sparsely populated and visited. The soil is excellent,
aspen and cherry forests abound, there is adequate supplies of fresh water,
the raw scenery is magnificent. The youth and complexity of the geology
just lends to the character of the place. Due to the collapse of the land
market there (since the Feds own too much to make the scattered private
parcels useful), land can be bought for less than $100/acre and good fertile
land with water and trees can be purchased for less than $500/acre. A lot
of people are not aware that a large section of the agricultural business in
Nevada is providing extremely high-end vegetables to boutique and
high-priced restaurants. Also, much of the wild game meat served in fancy
urban restaurants is hunted on huge preserves in Nevada (which has a
practically unlimited and very diverse supply of game animals due to the
relatively small number of people hunting them compared to the sheer size of
the State). Nevada isn't a huge agricultural State, but the quality of what
they can produce in the local climates and soil (excepting range beef
perhaps) is second to none.
As a point of disclosure, I am the owner of a large tract in one of the
major mountain ranges in Nevada. I picked it up for peanuts, but in any
other State you would have paid at least $5,000/acre for it.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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