Best high school mascot in Nevada: Top 5 candidates

From Tarantulas to Fighting Muckers, meet the best high school mascots in Nevada

Migrating tarantulas searching for a mate every fall in Gabbs, Nevada, willingly fight through all kinds of dust devils and muck.

But if they wander too far west in Mineral County, Cecil the Serpent lurks.

SBLive Sports' love for unique mascots with interesting back stories has been well documented.

We've crowned Hodags and Imps the past couple of years in national high school mascot contests, and now we're taking a spin through every state.

Over the next couple of months we'll go from Alabama through Wyoming featuring each state's best high school mascots, and then give readers a chance to vote for their favorite. Our Nevada poll will post Nov. 2 on highschool.si.com and stay open through Nov. 9.

Here are the top 5 high school mascots in Nevada:

Cheyenne Desert Shields

The North Las Vegas school was built in 1991, a year after the United States’ Operation Desert Shield began in Iraq. For Native Americans, a desert shield is a protective hide often decorated with bright designs and feathers.

Dayton Dust Devils

Not quite a tornado, a dust devil is a strong, well-formed, relatively short-lived whirlwind. And the Dust Devils' mascot has lots more personality than a lot of tornado logos out there — it looks ready to fight with its dukes up while sporting a serpent-like tail.

Gabbs Tarantulas

Anyone with arachnophobia will want to skip ahead to the next one (and stay away from Gabbs, Nevada, in the fall). From September through November, thousands of desert tarantulas get out of their burrows and roam searching for a mate, representing the world’s largest tarantula migration. They're so ever-present in Gabbs that the high school made the obvious choice of calling themselves the Tarantulas.

Mineral County Serpents

Mineral County residents have been telling horror stories about Walker Lake’s Cecil the Serpent since the 1800s, warning of imminent death to anyone who dared to swim in Cecil’s lake. If that’s not a perfect scenario for a high school mascot, I don’t know what is.

Tonopah Fighting Muckers

Tonopah is in mining country in off-the-beaten-path Nevada, and mucking is a little-known mining process. Muck is a mix of silver, rock and dirt, and muckers load it into ore cars for it to be rolled to the surface and processed. Fighting Muckers, on the other hand, play high school sports.

Dust devils form when a pocket of hot air from the ground rises quickly through cooler air above it, forming an updraft :: Michael Chow/The Republic

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-- Mike Swanson | swanson@scorebooklive.com | @sblivesports