Westgard Pass, photo by Harold Davis.

Westgard Pass lies on lonely Route 168 between Big Pine and the great open desert country of basins, ranges, and valleys. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Westgard Pass is closed to commercial trucking (the road is too narrow, steep, and twisting). Beyond Westgard Pass, to the east is a small, isolated college in Deep Springs, a ranch or two in Oasis, and nothing much else in terms of towns or people until you hit Goldfield or Beatty in Nevada, hundreds of miles away.

Oh yes, at the otherwise barren intersection of Nevada Highway 266 and U.S. 95 there are a series of legal whorehouses in the middle of nowhere. Invariably created from a number of pre-fabs stitched together, these hermetic and airconditioned institutions have big signs saying “Brothel,” “Open for Business,” and “Free Parking All Night.” If you are curious about legal prositution in Nevada, here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, and here’s a site put up by the marketing arm of the legal Nevada prostitution business organization.

As far as I am concerned, human society in Nevada is pretty gross. Stinking of stale tobacco smoke in every room, Nevadans have even managed to make consensual sin with another person look lonely and solitary.

This picture shows Westgard Pass, which I think of as the gateway to the desert, from above.