Nyack Shell is part modernity and part history.  We are proud to have the best and most modern fueling station equipment and a full service convenience store, restaurant, and post office, but we are equally proud to walk the hallways of a historic building which has been welcoming travelers for decades.

Our father, E. Stewart Wells, brought our family to the  mountains as children, and we brothers grew up in and around the original Nyack Lodge in Emigrant Gap on Highway 40.  Our father owned and operated Nyack Garage and its towing business, rescuing stranded motorists from snowbound trains and attending to broken down vehicles and accidents in the earliest days of an increasingly busy highway with little or no safety features. In the 1960s, the Lodge was split into portions and moved a short distance from its original site to make room for the new Interstate 80.

We grew up and traveled the world, but came back to Emigrant Gap to raise our families.  Our children did the same, and now our younger generation helps carry on the tradition of hospitality to travelers with three service stations, restaurants, parks, picnic and play areas, water wells, a post office, and, even bringing cellular signals to the top of the Sierras.

When you walk through the doors of Nyack Shell, all around you will see historic news clippings and framed images of our past, as well as vintage pumping equipment restored to museum quality, representing a century of keeping motorists on the roads.      While you take this brief tour downstairs, we work above you in our administrative offices, in the halls and rooms of the original relocated Nyack Lodge building (with room numbers still on the doors).

Progress, history, and three generations of family pride, still moving you safely over the Sierra Nevadas.

  — Stewart Wells, Grant Wells, and Families

History of Highway 40