The White Pine Expedition

October 4-16, 2026

After 2025’s successful adventures exploring the extremely remote northwest corner of Nevada, we found ourselves with a pretty heavy challenge: what’s next? This winter, we started laying out maps and tossing around ideas of what a route might look like. We are deep into planning and thrilled to extend an invitation to this group. Here are some details of the route.

• An on-road/off-road route traveling through White Pine and Elko Counties in Eastern Nevada. This is also where we will conduct our citizen science projects
• Start in Ely and end in Virginia City, NV
• Depart October 5, 2026, from Ely, Arrive Nevada Offroad Association Summit* at Pipers Opera House in Virginia City, October 15, 2026. Region map below. At the NVORA Summit, the Foundation will deliver a ‘Report from the Field’ presentation to the conference detailing our adventure and relevant trail/natural/historical/cultural/scientific aspects of our journey.
• The route will be broken into 3 segments, of which any can be joined into or departed from,
  • Stage in Ely the night of October 4th
  • Ely>Ely October 5th-12th
  • Ely>Virginia City Oct 13th-15th along the newly mapped 1861 trail that follows the Pony Express Route, American Discovery Trail, and Rte 50.
  • NVORA Summit at Virginia City, Oct 15-16 at Pipers Opera House.
• Expected Highlights of the route include the crossing of the Egan Range and Kirsch WMA, migrating herds of Pronghorn Antelope, Fly Fishing lakes and creeks, Hot Springs, Canyons, Volcanic Cones, Citizen Science – natural observation and data collection project, and unspoiled open spaces.
• This will not be a paid/guided/prepackaged tour. Participants join in their own pursuit of experience, assuming all risk to person and property. Wildwood Open Lands Foundation, Wildwood Expedition, Foundation Directors/Officers/Volunteers/Members assume no liability for damage or injury resulting from participation in this trip.
• The finalized route shall be determined as a team, while en route, particularly in White Pine Co. This is dependent upon late summer weather, which can greatly impact trail conditions.
• We continue to work with NDOW to determine the exact scope of our citizen science project. It will make for an underpinning of exploration. Pretty damn cool in our opinion.
• We’ll use this page to continually add details as they come forward. I will start a dated list beneath the route map below and notify everyone who responds with changes.

Some of the locations in White Pine County that we are building the Ely>Ely route around include:

With all of this info, the next step is your responsibility to email me to say you’re in, email me (jrosenfeld@wildwoodexpedition) to let me know if you’re out. Hit me up with any questions.

*The Nevada Offroad Summit is a 3-day event, hosted by the Nevada Offroad Association, designed to bring all stakeholders in motorized outdoor recreation together to share challenges, concerns, happenings, and connect with the NV offroad community. Learn more here at NVORA’s 2025 Summit page: NVORA Summit 2025

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Additional Details and Updates:

We will be traveling in an extremely remote location. We will have medical expertise with us on the trip. That said, if advanced medical treatment is necessary and you need to be heli-evac’d, it will be wise to have flight insurance. A med-evac insurance policy is affordable and available here: Home – AirMedCare Network

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STUFF.  I think it’s trite to suggest that this crew is anything less than fully equipt. A few things we should make sure that at least one of us has:

• Fire pit, wood/gas – players’ choice. Knowing that there will be some places that don’t have fire rings and don’t want to leave any new fire ring scars.
• several days of water for each
• camp games, if you have them and feel like carrying.
• UHF/VHF radio.  We’re going to need those.
• a couple of sets of traction boards, kinetic ropes, and static straps.  We should have a few sets in the crowd

5/4/26: NEW DETAILS: I’m excited about this! We’ve been talking to NDOW about some sort of naturalist research we can conduct in White Pine Co. We need final confirmation, but it’s shaping up to look like 2-3 efforts. All 100% achievable:

First, they would like us to complete a Herpetology (reptiles and amphibians) survey along our route using the iNaturalist app on our phones. Apparently, NDOW uses this for population density and identification because they can geo-fence an area and crowd-source raw data. Pretty Slick

Second, a Pika survey (because they are a declining species in NV) – which may be something to geek out about. If you don’t know what a Pika is, look here:Pika – Wikipedia.  Our goal would be to access the highest alpine talus in the preserve (drive as high as we can and then climb the final few hundred vertical yards, and do a photo/hand tally of the critters, documenting as much appropriate metadata as well. I would expect this to be a limited-duration effort for us.  (think 8-12hrs over 2 days) We can aggregate findings and report back to NDOW post-adventure.

Finally, NDOW has some road-drainage devices it calls ‘guzzlers’.  They would like us to document the condition of any that we drive across. I guess they are documented in the On-X premium subscription if any of us have purchased it. 

The only administrative component is that each of us will need to complete an NDOW volunteer reg form.  I’ll get all that business from our contact (Julie) the next time I speak with her.

Additionally, we may take on a component for surface water chemistry analysis. This would involve stopping at any surface water we cross, collecting a sample, conducting on-the-spot field chemistry, and documenting analysis results while also collecting weather conditions observations.

NVORA had released (in the past few weeks) the digital mapping of the 1861 Route that we will be using to travel East>West across the State. You can find more details about the 1861 Route here: 1861 Trail : : Battle Born Trail System