Camel Races

Just by the by, here are a couple of pictures from last weekend's Camel Races up in Virginia City. As you can see, the races also included emus and ostriches.









Clicking on the pictures should give you a larger version. I can't honestly say I was terribly impressed with the Camel Races. The crowd was pretty sparse, as you can see, and basically it was five minutes of entertainment packed into two hours. But it was a nice day up in the Virginia Range, and I always like visiting the Comstock, so it wasn't really a wasted day. Plus, it had been about a year since I've had a decent Indian Taco (or, as the sign said, and "Iandian Taco"):

That's Mount Davidson, popularly called Sugarloaf Mountain, in the background with the white "V" on it. Virginia City was built on Comstock Lode silver and was once Nevada's major city; if you ever watch Bonanza, Virginia City is the town Pa Cartwright and the boys are always going to. Today there's not much left besides the inevitable bars and trinket shops, but there's an awful lot of history up in those dry mountains.

Strange as it may seem camels actually have something of a history in Nevada and the West as well, but as with so much of Western History the myth is usually much more interesting than the real story. The bottom line seems to be that these animals never proved to be terribly useful in the cold, rocky, mountainous deserts of the Great Basin.

Oh, I should mention that there was one other excellent benefit to driving up to Virginia City for the camel races, and that was the chance to appreciate this vendor's tribute to the greatest hero in American military history, Elvis Presley:

Yes, that's a tasteful black-and-white picture of the "young Elvis" emblazoned on Old Glory. I think that pretty much says it all.