Searchlight,Nevada

Tiny little place, crazy name.  I believe this is Senator Harry Reid’s hometown.  Used to be a booming gold town, so important that it eclipsed Las Vegas.  Not any more.  There are a variety of stories about how the town got its name. Could have been named after a steamship that traveled the Colorado River, could have been that the original gold discoverer saw the gold after lighting a Searchlight brand match, or could have been that the original gold finder needed a searchlight to see the gold on his claim.  Nobody knows for sure. An online article called Searchlight a ghost town.  I don’t think it qualifies, since people still live here, but it has certainly been a “boom and bust” town.

Further down the road is Bullhead City, which straddles the Colorado River—casinos on the Nevada side, little town full of snowbirds in RV parks and jet ski rentals on the Arizona side.  The laundromat there had more “out of service” machines than operational ones, and the clothes dryers were 25 cents for only four minutes.  Gas, on the other hand, was $2.99 per gallon.

We spent the night in a pull out off a dirt road in the desert.  Sign on the highway claimed this was the road to “Christmas Tree Pass”. Yet not a single tree to be seen in the area.