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The Toiyabe Range runs for about 120 miles (190 km) down the middle of Nevada, through Lander and Nye counties, and is the range usually counted as the longest in the state. The Reese River valley lies along its western foot and Big Smoky Valley along its eastern one — a textbook Basin-and-Range fault block, a narrow wall of rock standing between two wide desert basins.
The high point is Arc Dome, 3,590 m (11,778 ft), near the southern end inside the Arc Dome Wilderness. Thirty-one named summits are mapped below, thirteen of them above 3,000 m. More of this range stands above timberline than of almost any other in Nevada, and the Toiyabe Crest Trail runs more than 70 miles along the top of it.
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The range runs north to south through the centre of Nevada, across Lander and Nye counties. The town of Austin and US Highway 50 — the stretch billed as the Loneliest Road in America — sit at its northern end; the Arc Dome Wilderness closes it at the south. The Reese River valley runs along the western foot and Big Smoky Valley along the eastern, with the Shoshone Range beyond the first and the Toquima Range beyond the second.
Almost all of it is public land inside the Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest, the largest national forest in the Lower 48. There are no towns in the range itself and no paved road crosses it except at the very north.
It is the range that normally gets the title. End to end it measures roughly 120 miles (190 km), and Nevada's other long ranges — the Monitor, the Ruby Mountains, the Snake Range — come in shorter. The hedge is worth keeping, because the state has several hundred named ranges and where one ends and the next begins is often a matter of convention rather than geology. But on the usual readings the Toiyabes come first, and they are certainly the longest continuous high ground in the state.
Arc Dome, 3,590 m (11,778 ft), stands near the southern end and gives its name to the wilderness area around it. The ten highest named summits in the range:
Thirty-one named peaks in the range are mapped on this page; thirteen of them stand above 3,000 m (9,840 ft).
The Toiyabe Crest Trail is the reason most hikers come. It is a National Recreation Trail of more than 70 miles (110 km) that follows the ridge line itself rather than a canyon, with about 30 of those miles inside the Arc Dome Wilderness. It was cut in the 1930s and it is the longest continuously maintained trail in Nevada; the northern and southern trailheads are both reached from State Route 376 in Big Smoky Valley.
Much of the route stays between 9,000 and 10,500 ft, which is why it is a week of walking in the open rather than a tunnel through forest. Water is the planning problem, not the gradient — springs are marked on the maps, but several of them are seasonal and by late August some are dry.
The Sierra Nevada takes the Pacific moisture before it reaches central Nevada, so the Toiyabes are too dry to carry continuous forest. What grows instead is sagebrush on the lower slopes, a belt of piñon pine and juniper above it, aspen and mountain mahogany in the canyons where water collects, and scattered limber pine near the crest. The result is a range with more ground above timberline than almost any other in Nevada: open alpine ridges you can walk for days without dropping into trees.
The Toiyabe Range is a fault block, lifted and tilted as the crust of the Great Basin stretched and pulled apart — the same process that gave the whole province its alternating pattern of narrow ranges and wide valleys. The range is arid now, but during the Pleistocene it held small glaciers, and the cirques and moraines they left are still legible on the higher slopes around Arc Dome.
Austin, a town of a few hundred people on US 50, is the usual base at the northern end — about 170 miles east of Reno. State Route 376 runs the length of Big Smoky Valley on the eastern side and gives access to the Crest Trail trailheads and to the canyons that lead up towards Arc Dome. The dirt roads into those canyons are passable by ordinary cars in summer but not after rain or snowmelt.
Snow holds on the crest into June most years. The hiking season runs from late June to early October, and September is usually the most reliable month: the afternoon thunderstorms of July and August have eased and the aspen in the canyons turn. Winter closes the forest roads, and the range is left to backcountry skiers and to the few who climb Arc Dome on snow.