Description
Is this really Nevada? That's the question I couldn't stop asking on this stretch of the Great Basin Highway, my Honda Element pointed north on US-93.
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Most people know this road as a lonely line on the map — a place to set the cruise control and stare at sagebrush between Las Vegas and Idaho. But slow down and take the turnoffs, and eastern Nevada hides two of the most surprising stops in the entire Great Basin: the Ward Charcoal Ovens and Cave Lake State Park. This is the story of finding both, on one tank of gas along US-93.
🔥 THE WARD CHARCOAL OVENS
A few miles south of Ely, Nevada, a dirt road peels off the highway and runs back toward the foothills of the Egan Range. I turned the Honda Element down it, and at the end stood six beehive-shaped stone ovens, thirty feet tall, looking like they were teleported in from another continent — which, in a way, they were.
The Ward Charcoal Ovens were built in 1876 to feed the silver boom of the Ward Mining District. Smelting silver ore takes charcoal — lots of it — and these were charcoal factories. They were raised by itinerant Swiss-Italian stonemasons called carbonari, or "charcoal men," who carried a centuries-old Old World craft across an ocean and set it down in the Nevada high desert. The stone is welded tuff, a volcanic rock quarried straight out of the surrounding hills.
The numbers are staggering. Each oven swallowed roughly 35 cords of wood, burned for twelve days, and it took about six acres of pinyon and juniper to fill a single one. All six running at once stripped the equivalent of 36 acres of forest in under two weeks — and a century and a half later, those hills still haven't fully grown back. The ovens only ran about three years (1876–1879) before the silver played out and the timber was gone.
After that, the ovens found a second life: shelter for stockmen and prospectors, and — as legend has it — a hideout for stagecoach bandits watching the lonely roads. No names, no records, just stories handed down. Today they're protected as Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park.
💧 CAVE LAKE STATE PARK
From the ovens, we left the blacktop and ran the dirt road most of the way over to Cave Lake State Park — the Honda Element earning its keep on the washboard, because the good stuff out here never sits right along the highway.
Cave Lake is a 32-acre, emerald-green reservoir sitting at 7,300 feet in the Schell Creek Range, just southeast of Ely. It has no business being this beautiful in the middle of the Nevada high desert. The lake was created by damming Cave Creek back in the 1930s; it's fed by Cave Creek and drains into Steptoe Creek below. The water glows a clear, layered green from the aquatic plants on the lakebed — easily one of the prettiest lakes in Nevada.
It's also a legendary trout fishery. Cave Lake holds stocked rainbow trout and wild German brown trout, and back in 1984 it produced the Nevada state-record brown trout — a 27-pounder. You'll find a web of hiking trails ringing the water, lakeside camping, flat-wake boating, and in winter it turns into an ice-fishing and Fire & Ice Festival destination.
⛰️ THE DETAIL THAT TIES IT TOGETHER
Here's what got me: driving into Cave Lake, the canyon opens to reveal massive pale cliffs of welded tuff — the exact same volcanic rock the carbonari cut to build those charcoal ovens. Stand in one spot and you can read millions of years of Great Basin geology, the 1870s silver rush, and a hidden mountain lake, all within a few miles of each other.
So — is this really Nevada? It sure is. This is the Great Basin Highway, US-93, the part everybody drives right past.
If you love back-roads history, geology, and the once-in-a-lifetime places most folks blow by at 70 miles an hour — and watching a Honda Element get a little dustier every mile — subscribe and come along for the ride. We don't just hit destinations; we dig into the stories underneath them.
📍 LOCATIONS IN THIS VIDEO
Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park — south of Ely, NV
Cave Lake State Park — Schell Creek Range, southeast of Ely, NV
US-93 / Great Basin Highway, White Pine County, Nevada
🏷️ #Nevada #CaveLake #WardCharcoalOvens #GreatBasinHighway #US93 #Ely #HondaElement #StateParks #Geology #BackRoads