Two Original Pony Express Stations Still Stand in the Nevada Desert

Sand Mountain Recreation Area in Nevada (NPS photo).

Two original Pony Express stations still stand, windblown and lonesome, along the highway between Fallon and Austin, Nevada. A National Park Service article suggests visiting in winter, when a visitor can explore them in solitude and feel something of the biting cold and cutting wind that the Pony riders and station-keepers endured.

Sand Springs

About 28 miles east of Fallon, an enormous white sand dune rises north of the highway, and a sign for the Sand Mountain Recreation Area marks the turn onto the access road. About 0.9 mile in, a left turn leads to the parking area for the Pony Express site, and a trail of about 100 yards leads to the stone ruins of the open-air station. It looks much as it did on October 17, 1860, when the British explorer and writer Richard Francis Burton stopped there during a stagecoach trip to California.

He was unimpressed. In his book about the American West he wrote that the station deserved its name: ridges of the finest sand, sometimes 200 feet high, shifted before every gale, the water nearby was thick and stale with sulphury salts and blistered the hands, and the roofless station was filthy and squalid, its walls open to every wind and its interior full of dust. He was equally critical of the Pony employees, who loitered about, except for one man lying crippled and apparently dying after a horse fell on his breastbone. The article suggests exploring the dunes before leaving.

The Sand Springs Pony Express station (NPS photo).

Cold Springs

Continuing east for approximately 34 miles, a turnout on the left has a blue Nevada State historical sign, and behind it stand the ruins of the Second Cold Springs Pony Express Station, which served the Pony for five months in 1861 and was also a stage stop. The first Cold Springs station was built on a hill in 1860, and its operators moved it to this lower spot so the stage line’s horses would not have to pull heavy coaches up the hill. The ruins are fenced for protection but clearly visible.

Cold Springs Pony Express station ruins and landscape (NPS photo).

About 0.2 mile farther east, on the right, is a Bureau of Land Management site for the first Cold Springs station. Reaching it takes an exposed two-mile round-trip hike through loose sand from the trailhead between the interpretive kiosk and the restroom, so the article advises dressing warmly in winter and carrying water in hot weather. This ruin is roofless too, but it has gun ports for defense during the Pyramid Lake War. A station keeper was killed here, and a rider died after being shot in a skirmish as he rode into the station.

Cold Spring station ruins (NPS photo).

Burton called the place wretched, half built and wholly unroofed, with four boys, an exceedingly rough set, who ate standing and had neither paper nor pencil among them, and he noted that the wolves howling around the station at night were said to be larger on those hills than elsewhere. The article asks visitors not to climb on the old stone walls or try to repair them, so that others can see and appreciate them.

Sources

• National Park Service, A Socially Distanced Excursion to Original Pony Express Stations in Nevada, Pony Express National Historic Trail; the explorer's words are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.