NVNevada Fun Facts

Nevada is named after snow and it is the driest state in the country. It is also the most mountainous: more than 300 named ranges run roughly north to south across it, ridge after ridge separated by flat valleys. The rolling sand dune version of Nevada that shows up in movies covers a small fraction of the ground.

Facts most people get wrong

• The Las Vegas Strip is not in Las Vegas. Nearly all of it sits in unincorporated Clark County, in the townships of Paradise and Winchester. The county kept the resort corridor outside the city limits, and the casinos on the Strip have a Las Vegas mailing address but not a Las Vegas city government.
• Prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas or Reno. Licensed brothels are permitted only in counties below a population threshold, which rules out Clark and Washoe, the two counties where the large majority of Nevadans live.
• Gambling was not always legal here. Nevada banned it in 1910 and did not legalize it again until 1931, the same year the legislature cut the residency requirement for a divorce to six weeks and made Reno a divorce destination.
• Reno is west of Los Angeles. The California border tilts sharply, so northern Nevada sits farther west than almost all of southern California.
• Hoover Dam is not a Nevada landmark. It straddles the Nevada and Arizona line in Black Canyon, and the state boundary runs across the crest of the dam itself.
• Locals say Nev-AD-uh, with the vowel of add, not Nev-AH-duh. Politicians campaigning in the state get corrected on it regularly.

Records and firsts

• Rushed into the Union. Nevada was admitted on October 31, 1864, eight days before the presidential election, to add votes for Lincoln and for the 13th Amendment. The full state constitution was telegraphed to Washington to beat the deadline, one of the longest telegrams ever sent. The flag has read Battle Born ever since.
• Most federal land of any state. Roughly 80 percent of Nevada is federally owned and managed, a larger share than anywhere else.
• Gold leader. Nevada produces around three quarters of all gold mined in the United States, most of it from the deposits along the Carlin and Battle Mountain trends in the north.
• The Comstock Lode, struck near Virginia City in 1859, was the first major silver deposit found in the United States and the reason Nevada is the Silver State.
• Driest state in the country, averaging under 10 inches of precipitation a year statewide.
• No personal income tax, one of a small group of states that funds itself without one, in Nevada's case largely on gaming and sales taxes.

Geography that surprises

• Nevada's highest point belongs to a California mountain. Boundary Peak, 13,147 feet, is a shoulder of Montgomery Peak, which stands just over the state line.
• The rivers do not reach the sea. The Humboldt runs about 300 miles across northern Nevada and then simply ends, evaporating into the Humboldt Sink. The Great Basin has no outlet to any ocean.
• One town breaks the time zone. Nevada runs on Pacific time except West Wendover, which observes Mountain time to stay in step with Utah, which begins at the edge of town.
• Three of every four Nevadans live in Clark County. The seventh largest state by area is nearly empty outside two metro areas.
• The California border is two straight lines, one tracing the 120th meridian south from Oregon and one cutting diagonally to the Colorado River. Both were drawn by surveyors, not by any river or ridge.
• Lake Tahoe reaches about 1,645 feet deep on the western border, second only to Crater Lake among lakes in the United States.

Where the name comes from

Nevada is Spanish for snow covered. The word was clipped from Sierra Nevada, the snowy range Spanish explorers named along what is now the western edge of the state. Congress created Nevada Territory out of the western part of Utah Territory in 1861 as Comstock silver drew thousands of miners, and statehood came three years later. The result is a state named for snowfall that receives less precipitation than any other, with the snow concentrated in the Sierra and in the high ranges of the interior. The motto, All for our country, dates to the same Civil War statehood push.

Bordering states

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