People rarely talk about the quiet on northern Nevada’s Thacker Pass, although besides the rolling, sage-filled hills below the Double H and Montana mountains and the empty, so-blue-it-hurts-a-little sky, the quiet demands your attention. The silence awes Wendelyn Muratore, who lives about 5 miles away from Thacker Pass on an alfalfa farm in Kings River Valley. The land surrounding her home is so quiet that after snow falls she can hear her neighbor’s footsteps crossing his yard a mile a way. “It’s a little tiny place on the map, but it’s beautiful,” Muratore said. “The solitude. The quiet. The beauty of the desert.” There’s nothing like the smell of sagebrush after a rain.