We left Southern Nevada around 6:30am and aired down at Cherry Creek. From there it’s 125.9 miles of dirt through White Pine Range Wilderness country — the historic White Pine Mining District, three towns that boomed on silver in the late 1860s and were mostly gone within twenty years. Two JKUs, three days, a fair amount of pin striping, and more wildlife than either of us expected out of a ghost-town run.
The White Pine Range climbs to just over 9,100 feet, and the wilderness area at its core — 40,042 federally protected acres administered by the Ely Ranger District — sits close enough to the route that its ridgelines were in view for most of the trip, even though the trail itself stayed on established Forest Service roads outside the boundary. What’s left of Hamilton, Treasure City, and the Hunter Mine tells one half of the story: a silver rush that built towns for thousands of people, then killed them just as fast. The other half is what’s living out there now, and it ended up being the real highlight of the weekend. Free-range cattle and a genuinely large pronghorn herd worked the sagebrush the whole way in on day one, and Hamilton itself turned out to be a wildlife magnet — a reservoir tucked into the hillside pulls in wild horses, mule deer, pronghorn, and cattle every evening, with enough raptors working the updrafts overhead that a pair of binoculars became the most-used piece of gear in camp. Sit and watch that valley for twenty minutes and something is always moving through it.
Know Before You Go — White Pine Range Wilderness
Hunter Mine
Silver-lead mine active roughly 1905–1908, with ore running about 30 oz/ton silver, 22% lead, and 6.4% copper. Small by White Pine's boomtown standards, but the waste-rock flat at its entrance makes a naturally level, wide-open camp — which is exactly what it was for us on night one.
Treasure City
The commercial and money center of the White Pine Mining District, perched at roughly 8,000 feet. Notorious for brutal, arctic-like winters even by the standards of a silver boomtown — most of what's left today is foundation stone and open ground.
Hamilton, NV
Grew from nothing to roughly 12,000 residents within two years of the 1868 Treasure Hill silver strike, and handled logistics and supply for the district. Falling silver prices, shallow ore, and fires in 1873 and 1885 finished it off — today it's reservoirs, wild horses, and scattered stone foundations.
Out of Southern Nevada by 6:30am, we aired down at Cherry Creek and pointed south into smooth, easy dirt and gravel — good miles, with free-range cattle and a genuinely large antelope herd working the sagebrush along the road, unbothered by two Jeeps rolling past. A mile or so past Cherry Creek, a Pony Express Historic Route marker was a good reminder that this stretch of desert was crossed by riders years before anyone struck silver in the White Pine Range. Tall mountains hem the route in on both sides the whole way, and the last few miles narrow down and steepen before dropping into the Hunter Mine, a small silver-lead operation that worked this ground for a few years around 1905 to 1908 — modest by White Pine’s standards, pulling ore that ran roughly 30 ounces of silver, 22 percent lead, and 6 percent copper per ton, decades after the district’s real boom had already come and gone forty miles south. What it left behind is a wide, level waste-rock flat that makes one of the better camps we’ve found out here, easily 6 to 8 rigs’ worth of room, with the mine’s old blacksmith shop still standing at the entrance. Made camp by 2:30, well ahead of the afternoon heat.
Forty years after the boom went bust, someone still thought this ground was worth mining. All that’s left now is a blacksmith shop and enough flat ground for eight rigs.
The valley road out of Hunter is the kind of trail that makes you wish every day started this easy — wide open, big sightlines, nothing to think about but the scenery. That ended after a fuel and lunch stop. The climb up to Treasure City is genuinely sketchy single-track, narrow enough that we scouted an equally sketchy go-around rather than commit blind — and it’s not hard to see why the mountain earned that reputation. This same grade is roughly what freight wagons and stagecoaches once used to haul silver ore down off the summit to the mills and on toward the railhead at Elko, a six-day wagon haul that felt like a miracle at the time, since it beat the months of travel the district would have faced before the transcontinental railroad went in. Treasure City sat at nearly 8,000 feet and held about 6,000 people at its 1869 peak, with ten stamp mills and roughly 200 mines crammed onto the mountainside — and winters brutal enough that a lot of that population simply didn’t come back the next spring. What’s up there now is foundation stone and open ground, windswept in a way that makes the old numbers hard to believe. Getting back down meant switchbacks and shelf road the rest of the way, narrow and overgrown enough that pinstripes were guaranteed. Rolled into Hamilton itself by mid-afternoon and just sat with it for the rest of the day — there are a couple of reservoirs around town, and by evening they’d pulled in wild horses, deer, antelope, and cattle, all showing up to drink within sight of camp.
Ten thousand people lived here for about two years. Now it’s a foundation, an elevation, and a Jeep trail down.
After two days of obstacles, the run south to Preston feels almost suspiciously easy — smooth, well-maintained track that meanders through canyon country the whole way, and it’s not a new road. This is roughly the same stage route that connected Hamilton to Pioche back in the 1860s, laid down before Preston existed at all. The town itself wasn’t founded until 1898, when thirteen wagons of Mormon settlers rolled in from Moroni, Utah, and staked out a townsite around a spring on the Maddox Ranch. It’s been a quiet ranching community ever since — never boomed, never really needed to. We passed free-range cattle bedded down at natural springs and wild horses grazing higher up as the elevation climbed, with shaded, well-kept camp sites tucked into the trees the whole way down. No obstacles, no drama, just a clean trail out. Back in Southern Nevada by about 3pm.
Hamilton grew a city of ten thousand and lost it in twenty years. Forty miles south, Preston just quietly kept ranching — and never had to rebuild.
