Northeastern Nevada Museum

The Northeastern Nevada Museum is a well-organised regional museum that covers the full sweep of this corner of the state: the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin, the Basque heritage of northeastern Nevada, the Pony Express and the Central Pacific Railroad, ranching and mining history, and the natural environment of the high desert.

The art gallery holds a permanent collection of Western art with notable works by Edward Borein and other early twentieth-century painters who documented the ranch life of the region. The natural history galleries cover local geology, fossils, and wildlife. It's an honest local museum — nothing spectacular in presentation, but rich in content and clearly run with genuine care for the history it documents. Allow ninety minutes.

Address: 1515 Idaho St, Elko, NV 89801. Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 9am–5pm, Sunday 1–5pm. Phone: 775-738-3418.

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The museum holds an unusual collection of original paintings by Edward Borein, a California artist who documented the vanishing open-range West in watercolors and etchings in the early twentieth century — his work is rarely seen outside of major collections. The natural history wing includes a mounted Columbian mammoth skeleton recovered from a site in northeastern Nevada, a reminder that the Great Basin was once a very different landscape.

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