Nevada's Shoe tree

shoetree

MIDDLEGATE -- Lots of hyperbole hereabouts: You've arrived in the middle of nowhere, via the loneliest road in America, and found the world's largest shoe tree.

Well, that's what the signs say -- including one tacked on to a 70-foot cottonwood tree whose branches seem to have sprouted several hundred pairs of shoes. Sneakers, cowboy boots, high heels, flip-flops, sandals, clogs -- even fishing waders and roller skates -- hang in tangled clumps on the lower, easy-to-reach branches.

The unlikely blossoms are sparse toward the top. It's tougher to toss shoes laced together high enough to hook them on a twig. If all those shoes aren't quirky enough, there's also a plastic flamingo, bicycle wheel, bra and a few Christmas ornaments in the old tree, an offbeat attraction in this otherwise barren area.

There's little more than sagebrush along the isolated central Nevada stretch of U.S. Highway 50, about 100 miles east of Reno. If you like high desert, it's awesome. If you don't, it's awful.

Even without the shoes, the big cottonwood's presence could start at least a brief conversation among bored travelers. Make it a shoe tree, and you've got material for miles.

Puns, for instance: Think it might be a pair tree? I don't know, but it's sure got sole. It leaves you all tied up in knots. Yeah, but it's so pedestrian.

Better yet, skip the bad jokes and stop at Old Middlegate Station, a bar and grill 50 miles from nowhere, to hear the whole story from owners Rus and Fredda Stevenson, who have an unobstructed view of the tree that's nearly 3 miles away.

Fredda was tending bar when the first shoes were tossed 10 years ago -- by a newlywed who got into a quarrel with his bride while camping in the shade of the tree. "They got married in Reno, and she lost a lot of their money gambling and he was angry," said Fredda. "So she was going to walk home, and he said, `You do and you'll have to go barefoot,' and threw her shoes into the tree." "Then he drove down here and we talked for two or three hours. I told him to go back and say he was sorry and that it was all his fault."

The man took her advice, the couple made up and drove away. A year later they stopped by to show off their first child, whose first pair of shoes are now in the tree.

Since then, hundreds of people have stopped to add a pair -- or take a pair. Snowshoes and a pair of skis weren't there for long. Shoes with a few miles left on them sometimes get replaced with worn-out footgear. "Our nephew needed some work boots. He was working up at the cat litter processing plant," said Rus. The plant? That's yet another roadside attraction a few miles away, even more remote than this part of U.S. 50. "But he could only get one boot down, and he fell out of the tree trying to get the other one. He never did get it."

Rus and Fredda are the tree's unofficial caretakers. He grabs binoculars to see if anyone's there, all the while describing how he spotted a young woman chopping at the tree with an ax. She caused little damage -- the trunk is about three feet in diameter -- but he called the sheriff anyway. They also collect information from motorists who have spotted shoe trees elsewhere. An Internet search turns up sightings in Arizona and Indiana; at a Florida nudist camp and a Minnesota university campus, and in Minnesota on a university campus. "Maybe it's a little piece of history," added Fredda. "People want to be remembered, if only by their shoes. If they drive by here again, they can say, `My shoes are up there.'"And it's better than carving their initials."

This was written in the Las Vegas Newspaper, and I had taken the picture on one of my many trips by it. There is NOTHING from Fallon to Austin, Nevada except for the bar at Middlegate. You drive for 100 miles between the two cities. Kinda gives you a lot of respect for the pioneers who traveled it in covered wagons. Actually they went up and followed the Humboldt River 60 miles north. It was the Pony Express that followed this route.