White Gold in Carson City

My friend Ivy, who lived in Nevada for years, looked genuinely puzzled when I said I was going to Carson City for the weekend. “Why?” she asked, looking no less puzzled after I mentioned the Spooner Lake Cross Country Ski Area and its stirring views of Lake Tahoe and the Sierra.

Even among Nevadans, Carson City is a conundrum. It may be the state capital, but it feels like a frontier outpost because of its isolated setting in a high-desert valley.

The main drag, Carson Street, may be a busy highway punctuated with soulless car dealerships and strip malls, but it also boasts evocative 19th and early 20th century buildings, such as the genteel 1871 capitol, with its sandstone walls, marble corridors and silver-colored tin dome.

The roar of nickel slots in the town’s casinos may be deafening, but close by lies a historic residential district, a tranquil enclave where the past has a way of quietly making itself heard over the din of modern life.

I knew we were in for a weekend of contrasts as my partner, Mac, and I approached Carson City late on a Friday afternoon in mid-December. The city sits at 4,600 feet in Carson Valley, midway between Reno and the city of South Lake Tahoe; as we approached, 7,140-foot Spooner Summit lay under a new blanket of snow.

Entering the valley around dusk, I was struck by the compelling landscape that stretched before us: a vast plain of low, scrubby growth backed by a formidable line of craggy peaks.

We checked into a basic but comfortable room at the Hardman House, a clean, friendly motor lodge close to the capitol. The downstairs lobby is a B&B-like; sitting room with sofas, overstuffed chairs and a counter where guests can help themselves to coffee, afternoon wine and continental breakfast.

That night, despite temperatures in the mid-40s, we bundled up and walked along Carson Street, admiring the capitol grounds and sizing up places to eat. We settled on the Cafe del Rio (302 S. Carson St.), which serves nuevo Southwest cuisine. The restaurant is on the lower floor of an 1862 brick building that supposedly is the oldest hotel in Nevada. (The upper floors are a residential hotel.)

With its worn wood floor and ristras of red chilies, the restaurant’s interior felt warm and cheerful. Our meal was good: a couple of smooth porters, a succulent pork tamale topped with pineapple-chili sauce, and pan-roasted monkfish served with a chipotle-potato casserole.

On our way back to the Hardman House, we stopped briefly at the Carson Nugget casino to ogle its small collection of natural gold specimens--nuggets as well as unusual forms like leaf gold and ribbon gold that are shaped by cracks in surrounding quartz. Precious ores, especially silver, essentially created Carson City in the 1860s, when the town became a transportation hub for the Comstock Lode in nearby Virginia City.

Timber was also an important part of the economy, and in its rough-and-tumble early years, Carson City was populated by a colorful cast of characters: lumber barons and dance hall girls, grizzled miners and Washoe Indians, and even a brash young reporter named Samuel Clemens, a frequent visitor at the home of his brother, the secretary of the Territory of Nevada.

The next morning, before heading for the ski trails, we joined a crowd of locals at the Cracker Box (402 E. William St.), a diner around the corner from our hotel. We packed away eggs, flapjacks and thick slices of bacon.

Using a visitors bureau brochure, we also took a short driving tour of the historic residential district on the west side of town, checking out the sprawling, Neoclassical 1909 Governor’s Mansion and the 1879 Bliss Mansion, built for a lumber magnate and now a high-end inn of the same name.

We spent that day at Spooner Lake Cross Country Ski Area, a friendly, low-key operation 15 miles from Carson City on the Tahoe side of Spooner Summit. Spooner Lake, which has a reputation as one of the prettiest and least crowded cross-country areas in the Tahoe basin, had opened for the season just that day. Because it lies on the eastern side of the Sierra, snow here tends to build more slowly than at other resorts in the region, although Spooner Lake’s 50-plus miles of groomed trails often are open until April.

At the simple day lodge, we rented relatively new skis, boots and poles for $16 a person, and because some trails weren’t open yet, the $15 all-day trail fee was reduced to $10. (More snow fell last week.)

Mac and I skied in bright, sunny weather for about four hours, following the moderately difficult North Canyon Trail, which wound through alleys of snow-dusted pines and past meadows covered in blankets of white.

We made a detour to look at one of Spooner Lake’s two fully equipped ski-in rental cabins ($130 to $175 per night for two during the winter, including trail passes, rentals and lessons), and occasionally spotted animal tracks in the snow. We had the trail mostly to ourselves, although we did encounter one couple who pointed us toward an off-trail route that led to a magnificent overlook of Lake Tahoe.

We took an apres-ski soak at the Carson Hot Springs Resort (1500 Hot Springs Road), on the outskirts of Carson City. The resort--a motley collection of buildings and a large outdoor pool of 98-degree water--occupies the site of a hot spring that drew Native American bathers for generations before European settlers arrived. From one corner of the pool, I had a good view of forbidding mountains. We bobbed contentedly for almost an hour, watching as the evening star appeared and the sky shaded from orange to violet to deep cobalt.

That night we had drinks at Adele’s (1112 N. Carson St.), a converted Victorian house and a favorite restaurant of lobbyists and politicos, before walking to Garibaldi’s (301 N. Carson St.). The tchotchke-filled Italian restaurant occupies a turn-of-the-century storefront dominated by an old dark wood bar, and it was packed when we arrived. Mac and I split a salmon tartare appetizer, but try as we might, we could only make a dent in our main courses: a nice meat-sauce lasagna and spaghetti accompanied by three of the largest (and most tender) meatballs I’ve ever seen.

Still full the next morning, we opted for a light breakfast of muffins and coffee from the popular City Cafe Bakery (701 S. Carson St.), followed by a walk in Riverview Park, restored wetlands adjacent to the Carson River. As we sipped lattes and exchanged greetings with morning dog walkers, we spotted cottonwood trees whittled down by resident beavers and searched the horizon without luck for wild mustangs. According to one old-timer we met, the horses still graze in the area.

Our final stop was the Nevada State Museum (600 N. Carson St.), housed in an old federal mint that churned out nearly $50 million in gold and silver coins from 1870 to 1893. The museum has a bit of everything Nevadan: a diorama with a stuffed mountain lion, coin displays, stone tools of prehistoric residents, even a walk-through mock-up of a mine.

What captured my attention most was a display of 10 baskets with bold geometric patterns woven by Dat So La Lee, a renowned Washoe weaver from Carson City who died in 1925 at age 90. Though crafted in simple, traditional materials of willow, redbud bark and black bracken fern root, they were eloquent reminders of Carson City’s past.

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Budget for Two

Round-trip air fare, LAX to Reno: $288.00

Car rental, two days: 79.68

Hardman House, two nights: 149.04

Dinner, Cafe del Rio: 48.66

Breakfast, Cracker Box: 16.32

Trail pass, ski rental: 52.00

Carson Hot Springs: 20.00

Dinner, Garibaldi’s: 59.38

Other food and drink: 21.71

Nevada State Museum: 6.00

FINAL TAB: $740.79

Hardman House Motor Inn, 917 N. Carson St., Carson City, NV 89701; telephone (866) 859-5148 (toll free) or (775) 882-7744, fax (775) 887-0321. Spooner Lake Cross Country Ski Area, P.O. Box 981, Carson City, NV 89702; tel. (888) 858-8844 or (775) 749-5349, fax (775) 883-5684, https://www.spoonerlake.com.