1 Week In Ely, NV – Here’s What We Did

After spending 2.5 weeks in Wyoming, we drove down to Salt Lake City, UT which Shae flew out of to go to South Africa for her first trip of Ignite Travel Tours.

Truffles and I then continued on our way to the 49th state of our road trip – Nevada. Our first stop there was Ely, a smallish city on the eastern side of the state. Although Ely itself didn’t seem like a hotbed of exciting things to do, it did put us within driving distance of several places I wanted to visit.

Here’s where we stayed there, as well as what we did in and around the area.

Where We Stayed In Ely

We spent a week in Ely, staying at the La Quinta there. It was a good sized room with a comfortable king bed, a sleeper sofa and desk area to work at. A wet bar featured a small sink, mini fridge and microwave, all of which were useful to have.

At the far side of the room was an armchair with an ottoman, as well as a small dining table and chairs. This was therefore a well-equipped room for the week.

Breakfast is complimentary at the La Quinta Ely for all guests and there was a guest laundry area with a couple of washing machines and a couple of dryers.

A slight quirk with our particular room was that it seemed to be above the hotel’s own laundry facilities, so our room would shake when their washing machine was coming to the end of its cycle and so spinning quickly. I think that’s what was causing it anyway, but it wasn’t a huge issue.

I booked this stay using Wyndham Rewards points. It ordinarily costs 15,000 points per night, but I have a Wyndham business card which means that I get a 10% discount on award redemptions, thereby dropping the cost to 13,500 points per night. For comparison, the cash cost was $145.62 per night including tax.

What We Did In & Around Ely

Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park

Back in the late 1800s, Ward was a booming town, mining the local area for silver, copper and lead ore. To produce enough charcoal to smelt that ore, they built beehive-shaped ovens nearby which were used to burn trees to make that charcoal.

It was a really interesting place to visit, especially seeing as it was a relatively short drive from Ely. You can read more about my visit to Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park here.

Cathedral Gorge State Park

Cathedral Gorge State Park was a longer drive than the charcoal ovens were as it was an almost two hour drive away to the south. It’s a pet-friendly park though, so this was a good opportunity to get Truffles out of the hotel, so one afternoon we headed down there.

The park was like a low key version of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. Its unusual rock formations were formed through erosion of bentonite clay; there are official trails, as well as other paths to explore the formations from different vantage points.

One of the best features of the park is that it contains multiple slot canyons. While they weren’t on the scale or beauty of places like Upper Antelope Canyon and Lower Antelope Canyon in Utah, the ones in Cathedral Gorge are pet-friendly and so Truffles was able to experience them for the first time. The slight downside though is that they’re very narrow, so I could only get so far before having to turn around.

A winter storm had been rolling in around that time, so it was very chilly the day we visited. The park is very exposed and windy, so we didn’t spend quite as much time there as I’d originally anticipated, but I’m glad we made the long drive nonetheless.

Great Basin National Park

The other main reason that I’d wanted to stay in Ely was to visit Great Basin National Park. That winter storm I mentioned earlier ended up impacting our visit to Great Basin a little though. There’s a scenic drive up Wheeler Peak which seems like it can give some great views at the top, but access to much of that road was closed off the day before our visit due to snowfall from that storm.

This also meant that I missed out on seeing what’s thought to be the oldest living trees in the world – bristlecone pines that grow on Wheeler Peak that are believed to be 5,000 years old.

Great Basin National Park is a relatively new National Park, being established in 1986 to protect the South Snake Mountain Range. The name comes from the fact that much of the area is, in effect, a basin. After his expedition to the area in 1843-44, John Charles Fremont described the region as follows:

It is a singular feature, a basin of some five hundred miles diameter in every way, between four and five thousand feet above the level of the sea, shut in all around by mountains, with its own system of lakes and rivers, and having no connexion (sic) whatever with the sea.

It’s that latter part of his description that I found most fascinating about the park. I’m so used to thinking that the Continental Divide is what separates the nation’s rivers between those that flow to the Pacific Ocean and those that flow to the Atlantic Ocean, I didn’t realize that this region had rivers that didn’t actually flow out to the Pacific.

Seeing as it’s a National Park, it’s not a particularly pet-friendly place, but due to how long I was due to be gone that day I wanted to bring Truffles along. That meant I didn’t explore Lehman Caves which had come recommended as I was concerned it would be too warm for her to be left in the car during the day.

She did hang out in the car briefly with the windows somewhat down so that I could head inside the visitor center to learn more about the park and get our National Park passport stamped. There was lots of interesting information to learn in there, such as the fact that the Great Basin Desert is the only cold desert in North America.

Although I got unlucky with the timing of my visit as I missed out on Wheeler Peak, I did get lucky with my timing in another way. Great Basin National Park is an International Dark Sky Park which means that there’s very little light pollution; the park is fairly remote and so is quite a drive from larger towns and cities. As a result, the night sky is much more clear, allowing you to see far more stars than normal, as well as being able to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

To take advantage of this feature, the park runs astronomy events for much of the year on certain nights (it seems like it might be Saturday nights). My final night in Ely was also the last night that the park was running that astronomy event for the season, so I was able to attend that. That session wasn’t pet-friendly, so Truffles once again had to hang out in the car, this time with her little hoodie on as the temperature drops after dark.

The astronomy program is free to attend – you just show up at the Astronomy Amphitheater at the designated time. After a short presentation by one of the park rangers, we were able to use the telescopes they’d set up to look at some features in the night sky.

The night I visited they had one telescope set up to look at Saturn, with another set up to look at the Hercules Globular Constellation. That latter constellation contains 300,000-500,000 stars. I tried to get a photo of both the planet and constellation using my phone through the eyes of the telescopes, but I couldn’t get it lined up correctly either time.

One feature in the night sky we were able to see with the naked eye was the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet that was passing by earth at that time. You can see the comet and its tail streaking in the sky in the middle of the photo below.

Just before leaving the event, I tried using the astrophotography setting on my Google Pixel 8 phone to take a time lapse of the night sky. Here’s a still from that – the dotted white line in the bottom right corner was, I think, a Starlink satellite rather than a shooting star.

Being able to see the night sky like that is always fun as we’re normally in more populated areas with light pollution, so star viewing is usually far more minimal.

Where We Ate & Drank In Ely

Nowhere! I didn’t end up eating out in Ely as the hotel was right next to a Ridley’s Family Markets grocery store. I therefore just stopped by there each day to grab something for dinner. While that made the dining experience not as interesting, it did help with our budget for November!

What We Missed In Ely

There were quite a few other things to do in and around Ely that I didn’t have time to get to – here’s what we missed out on:

• Nevada Northern Railway Museum – this was in downtown Ely itself and when researching it online, it looked much more interesting than I’d have anticipated for a railway museum. The museum also runs train rides out towards Great Basin National Park where you can look at the night sky.
• Lehman Caves – these looked like a great set of caverns at Great Basin National Park, but you have to take an organized tour – you can’t just take a self-guided tour like you can at places like Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.
• Million Dollar Courthouse – This is a courthouse which went drastically over budget after its design and construction began in the 1870s. The total cost ended up being more than $1 million back then, so a ludicrous amount in today’s money.
• Lamoille Canyon – dog-friendly hikes
• Echo Canyon Reservoir
• Elgin Schoolhouse State Historic Site
• Beaver Dam State Park