Just outside the entrance to Reno's Nevada Museum of Art stands Cairn, a kneeling man made of rocks. It was commissioned in 1998 as part of a major exhibition, From Exploration to Conservation: Picturing the Sierra Nevada.

Burning Man is an annual gathering of approximately forty thousand people in Nevada's Black Rock Desert the week before Labor Day. Journalists, scholars, and filmmakers who have chronicled Burning Man agree that the event defies classification. It is a unique phenomenon, predicated on a level of spontaneity that borders on anarchy. The nature of the event may vary from year to year or from person to person, emphasizing both the individual and communal experiences.

Bonanza, the long-running NBC television series, features Lake Tahoe and Virginia City settings. The series gives Nevada its strongest tie with westerns since it has been watched by millions for more than five decades in its original telecasts and in syndication. The series began in 1959 and continued for 14 seasons covering 430 episodes. These then went into syndication on specialty networks and many are available on video and DVD.

Bernard Schopen was born in 1942 in Deadwood, South Dakota. He earned bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at the University of Washington, and completed his PhD in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he has taught since 1990. Schopen is truly a western writer. His books deal with California novelist Ross Macdonald, or the various landscapes of Nevada—the setting for his three detective novels—which center on their narrator-protagonist, Jack Ross.