Educator Laura Ethel Mills left a lasting impression on those she taught, either in the classroom or on field trips to the deserts that she loved so much. An accomplished photographer and recognized authority in the field of natural history, Mills created permanent images of the diversity of life found in Nevada's Great Basin.

Approximately twenty-five miles east of Fallon, Nevada, U.S. Highway 50 crosses a barren, alkali-crusted, dry lake bed known as the Four Mile Flat. Along this windblown stretch of the Loneliest Highway in America, a hundred or so yards north toward the wavering dunes of Sand Mountain, is a small, weathered looking picket fence that surrounds a five-foot-square pile of rocks topped by a whitewashed wooden cross. Local folklore maintains this is either gravesite or a memorial.

For many decades, a seventy-foot-tall cottonwood tree, known by travelers and locals alike as the Shoe Tree, could be found at a dusty roadside pull-off, just beyond the old Pony Express stop at Middlegate Station. It was on the north side of U.S. Highway 50, approximately sixty miles east of Fallon. Shoe trees are scattered throughout the West and are the subject of local folklore, but none stood more majestically than this one on Highway 50.