More than 100 companies have taken up residence inside the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRI), a corporate oasis that is roughly 160 square miles and the biggest industrial park in the world, according to its developer. Instead of hacking out silver and gold, they are building shipping hubs and data centers and state-of-the-art factories. Over the hills and out of sight, multinational corporations that everyone knows-Tesla, Apple, Google, Walmart, and others-have come to this old land of outlaws to build their own boomtown. “The trouble was not how to get it,-but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.”Ī century and a half later, the wealth has returned. “Money was wonderfully plenty,” Twain wrote about Storey County during his time there. This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal. A young reporter calling himself Mark Twain complained that there was so much mining under his newspaper’s office that his desk would shake from the explosions. The Comstock Lode and other bonanzas ignited a boom, fueling opulent hotels, opium dens, saloons, and brothels. My Lyft driver drove east on the interstate, following the Truckee River, with its bands of wild horses, to Storey County, a patch of Nevada desert whose county seat was once famously called “the Richest Place on Earth.” In the late 1850s, miners struck pay dirt here. In the distance, the caps of the Virginia Range were flecked with snow. The winter morning was cloudy, the diffused light finding patches of ice in the parking lots outside the low-rent casinos and prime rib joints of Reno, Nevada.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |