Elko County, Nevada · near Wells · APN 010-57K-040: Base Camp in Nevada's Mule Deer and Elk Country

Glass the Ridges from Ground That's Finally Yours

You've chased mule deer across the public units around Wells for years, learned which draws hold elk when the snow pushes them down, and driven home every night to a place that was never really yours. The ground you hunted belonged to everybody, which is another way of saying it belonged to nobody, least of all you.

This is ten acres of your own in that same big game country. Pitch a wall tent, park the trailer (the one you keep threatening to actually use), and set up a base camp you don't have to break down when the season closes. Glass the ridges at first light, come back to your own fire after dark. Mule deer hunter, off-gridder, weekend camper, or the fella whose idea of a good neighbor is a jackrabbit? There's room out here for you.

It sits in the high-desert sagebrush basin near Wells, an I-80 town that got its start as a water stop, first for wagon trains working west along the Humboldt River, later for the railroad that still runs through it. Elko, and the nearest real grocery run, is roughly an hour on, which is about the right distance to keep the impulse purchases down.

Now for the straight talk. The way in is dirt and unimproved, and the route in crosses BLM land on primitive two-track, so drive it before you ever set a corner post. The upside of a rough road is the crowd it turns back and the game it leaves moving.

Out here the horizon does most of the talking, and it doesn't much care what you did for a living. A piece of Nevada like this has been waiting on somebody to stand on it and call it theirs.