Views from the City and Vicinity.
Though the landscape visible from the city cannot be called beautiful, yet it is grand and picturesque. On all sides except the east, the town is shut in by near ranges of high, rocky, and barren mountains. To the eastward the eye reaches over a vast area composed of tracts of sandy desert, valley lands, dark and rocky hills, and rugged and towering mountain ranges. The chief of these is the Humboldt Range, seen blue or purple in the distance, from 150 to 190 miles away. These mountains and their snow-clad peaks stand out against the dark-blue of the sky far beyond the green cottonwood groves that follow the meanderings of the Carson River, far beyond the Forty-mile Desert and the lake and sink of the Carson, and beyond Humboldt Lake and Sink.
To the northeast are seen several sharp and splintered peaks, while to the southeast, from twenty to fifty miles away, rise the huge and grand peaks of the Como Mountains. From the Divide (the dividing ridge between Virginia and Gold Hill) may be obtained a magnificent view of the main Sierra Nevada Range and its many mighty snow-capped peaks as they trail and circle away from west to south till they are lost to view behind lower interior ranges at a point over 150 miles away.