Virginia City on Foot

Virginia City sits on a mountainside, which means this walk has a correct direction: start at the top and let the hill do the work.

The Comstock Lode made this the richest place in Nevada and for a while one of the richest in the country. Twenty-five thousand people lived here in the 1870s. Around eight hundred do now, and what is left is an unusually dense run of buildings that nobody ever had a reason to knock down.

Start with the dead

The Silver Terrace Cemeteries are not one cemetery but a dozen, climbing the hill in separate plots: Masonic, Catholic, Odd Fellows, Firemen's, the Pacific Coast Pioneers. Mining towns sorted themselves by fraternal order and by nation, and the hillside is the clearest surviving map of who the Comstock actually was.

Walk down from here rather than up. It is a mile to the next stop and all of it downhill.

Down C Street

The Fourth Ward School is a four-storey wooden building from 1876, Second Empire, with its classrooms intact — the kind of public architecture a town builds when it believes the money is permanent.

Then the run along C Street: The Way It Was Museum, packed with mining machinery and photographs in the old manner; St. Mary in the Mountains, Nevada's oldest working Catholic church, Gothic Revival, rebuilt after the fire of 1875 took most of the town; and the Mackay Mansion, which was John Mackay's house when he was one of the four men who controlled the Lode.

The saloon with a mine in it

The Ponderosa is a functioning bar. Behind it is the entrance to a real tunnel, and the tour goes into the hillside from the back of the room. It is the most concise illustration available of what this town was built on and what it was built for.

Twenty metres on is the Washoe Club, a preserved saloon and museum with a long reputation for ghost stories, and past that the Silver Queen, whose portrait is made of several thousand silver dollars.

Piper's Opera House hosted touring performers, prize fights and political meetings; there have been three Pipers, fire having taken the first two.

Finish underground

Chollar Mine is the last stop and a proper one: a guided descent into preserved workings, square-set timbering and all. It is about two thirds of a mile south of the opera house, which is the second-longest leg of the day and the only one you might regret at altitude.

Practical

Three miles end to end, most of it gently downhill if you go in this order, at six thousand feet.

The cemeteries and the churchyard are free and always open. Chollar and the Ponderosa are ticketed and run on scheduled tours, so check times before you build the day around them. The Mackay Mansion and Piper's both keep limited hours that vary by season.

Doing this in reverse means finishing with a mile of uphill to the cemeteries. That is a real climb, not a figure of speech.