A Chance to Own a Big Piece of Nowhere

Dreams rattle through this land now and again.

The tumbleweed spins through the sage, the sun sets purple over a wrinkled range and a dreamer stands--alone, in silence--thinking life would be rich here.

This land is harsh. It’s not for everyone.

But those who fall, fall hard.

And so they could not resist a recent auction billed as the Nevada Land Rush--and hyped as the biggest real estate deal since pioneers in covered wagons raced to claim Western homesteads.

Giddy at the thought of owning a chunk of the land they love, the dreamers bid their savings for untamed parcels out on the echoing edge of nowhere. Now, they’re trying to decide whether the deals are too good to be true or too bad to be scams. Or both.

“No one in their right mind would buy this property,” said Heather Baird Donovan, a San Francisco fiction writer. She bid on it nonetheless because, she said, musing, “it’s an essential part of my psyche.”

The parcels for sale--one square mile each--sprawl across Northern Nevada’s cowboy country. That sounds romantic, but the reality is this: No power. No phones. No water. No gas. And of course, no neighbors. Just shrubs and stars and wild horses and endless views of endless space.

Nevada Land & Resource Co., which owns the property, accepted bids as low as $39,000 per square mile. Yet the sales contract bristles with conditions.

Buyers can build, hunt or play on their land. They also can draw well water for domestic use. But they do not own the rights to any minerals or aquifers that might be on their property. Those rights remain with various corporations, which can come in at any time, cut roads across the rough terrain and prospect for gold, sand, water, gravel, oil or any other resource.

Such restrictions prompted Nevada authorities to describe the land rush as a “buyer beware” deal.

Even so, the April 2 sealed-bid auction attracted thousands of inquiries from around the world. Serious bids came in on more than half of the 101 parcels available. Eighteen sales are already in escrow, according to a company attorney.

“To own one square mile of land, I guess that’s the attraction,” auction broker John Petrosky said.

Figuring Nevada’s relentless sprawl will one day slop onto their parcels, which lie 50 to 350 miles east of Reno, many of the bidders hope to hold the land as an investment, Petrosky said. Others want it for recreation--hunting, camping, racing all-terrain vehicles. Then there are those who draw inspiration from the solitude, find dreams in the desolation.

“You can sit out there and stare at nothing for a long, long time,” Donovan said. “It’s like flying. Your mind just goes and goes and goes.”

Her partner in the land deal, career counseling guru Don Asher, added: “It gives you something that people all over California don’t even know they’re missing--the opportunity to be truly alone.”

Truly alone is right.

The 54 parcels that received bids at auction are strung out on both sides of Interstate 80, which slices through Nevada en route between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. They’re impressively vast: the entire Southern California city of Hawaiian Gardens, population 14,000, could fit in one of the square-mile plots.

“You can walk around naked without anyone looking in the windows,” said Karen Lipera, a Reno resident who bought a $40,800 parcel with her husband, Frank.

Some of the parcels offer sloped hills, juniper trees or tantalizing peeks at the Sierras. Others are painfully barren, just acre after acre of salt flats sprinkled with a grainy white crust. Most are so far from civilization that the only landmarks for miles are the rusty chunks of abandoned pickups used for target practice.

Holding up a hand as the wind nudged through the scruffy brush that blankets his parcel, Frank Lipera asked in wonder: “Doesn’t that sound good?”

The silence stretched until he broke it.

“No barking dogs, no cars, no people hollering at each other,” he said contentedly.

The Liperas’ land, like the other parcels offered at auction, is old railroad property that Congress deeded to the transcontinental railroads in 1862. Nevada Land & Resource Co. bought nearly 1.4 million acres from the Santa Fe Railway two years ago for about $50 million. The company leased most of the land for farming, grazing or mining, but decided to auction scattered parcels “just to test the market,” Petrosky said.

Auction advertising played off the land’s Wild West mystique. A breathless brochure compared the auction to the Oklahoma Land Rush of a century ago. The accompanying photos hinted of rugged adventure: dusty cowboy boots, a yellowing treasure map, sepia images of covered wagons.

But not all buyers find roughing it romantic.

Karen Lipera, for instance, neatly applied pink lipstick as soon as she climbed out of her Jeep Cherokee to survey her parcel one recent afternoon.

A New York City escapee, Lipera is no pampered mall rat; she loves to camp and shoot and restore old cars. But she’s no gritty-faced pioneer, either. She and her husband, a retired engineer, plan to build a solar-powered house on their land, “and we’re not looking at a little cabin,” she said. “We’re talking 2,000 to 3,000 square feet.”

They’re also talking cellular phone, VCR, Internet access, laser discs, even espresso maker.

Of course, modern conveniences cannot mask the isolation of their home-to-be, which is 14 miles from the nearest power line--and which takes some serious bouncing over some very bumpy roads to reach. The closest town is Fernley, home of the 7 ZZZ’s motel ($24.95 a night), the Silverado Casino and a storefront pizza parlor (“We toss ‘em, they’re awesome”). The nearest city of any size is Reno, about an hour’s drive away.

“A lot of people think we’re nuts,” Karen Lipera said.

But she and Frank like the Wigwam burgers in Fernley. More important, they love the quiet of their parcel, where “the stars come all the way down to the ground,” Karen Lipera said.

Though they worry a bit about the mineral rights, the Liperas figure the odds are low that anyone will select their particular square miles of Nevada to dig for gold. “We’re trying not to think about it,” Karen Lipera said.

Donovan cannot push aside her concerns as easily.

Her husband, Dwight, an attorney, picked through the 28-page contract and warned her that it would leave her liable for any hazardous waste left on her land by a mining operation. He also said she would be responsible for increased property taxes if mining improvements bump up the land’s assessed value.

Plus, Donovan worries that miners might pillage her parcel and leave it a wreck.

And yet, the land tugs at her.

The parcel she’s considering is near Winnemucca, which she describes as just one mountain range from Pyramid Lake. She wants to build a cabin there and write books longhand, on legal pads. She wants to camp there with her daughters, Haley and Renee. “I want to show them there’s another kind of life,” she said.

Her husband, a surfer, does not understand the desert’s hold on her. Donovan cannot explain it either. She simply recognizes its strength. “Whenever I go out there,” she said, “my heart does pitter-patters.”

Her neighbor Asher knows the feeling. He’s the author of suit-and-tie career books such as “Asher’s Bible of Executive Resumes” and “The Overnight Job Change Strategy.” But get him in Nevada and he turns “redneck,” he said. He glories in popping off shots at tin cans, rambling across achingly empty ravines and soaking in every hot springs he can find.

“I don’t get bored, ever,” he said. Addicted to visiting, Asher dreams of owning. “It’s a visceral experience to own land,” he said. “Your use of it is the same, but the experience of being there is different. . . . I could use a good dose of it.”

Unwilling to sign the restrictive contract but unable to abandon their dreams, Donovan and Asher are trying to negotiate a better deal. That might prove difficult, however, especially because Nevada Land & Resource was bought last week by a Toronto-based investment firm called Global Equity Corp., which places tremendous stock in the land’s mineral and water resources.

“You have an area here that has been one of the most productive for precious minerals outside South Africa,” said John Hart, chief executive officer of Global Equity.

Still, Hart insisted that auction buyers could enjoy their land even if mining equipment moved in. A square mile is roomy enough for everyone, he said. “It’s not a matter of building your dream home and all of a sudden a skip loader comes in and digs a big pit next-door.”

In addition, Global Equity attorney Jeffrey Trant promised that buyers would be compensated for any losses they might incur as the result of mining activity on their land. The contract already grants them a 0.5% share in any profits from mineral extraction on their parcel.

“The fact that we’re not planning to hold any more of these auctions,” Hart said, “tells you who we think got the better end of the deal.”

Asher is not so sure the auction was a bargain. All he knows is that the parcel suits his offbeat needs, so he would desperately like to snag it.

“If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere,” Asher said, “this will do the job.”

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Land Sale Site

Nevada Land & Resource Co. is auctioning 101 square-mile parcels along Interstate 80. The company owns 1.3 million acres in the region.

Source: Nevada Land & Resource Company