Minden is a census-designated place (CDP) in Douglas County, Nevada, United States.

It was founded in 1906 by Heinrich Friedrich Dangberg Jr., who named it after the town of Minden, in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which was near his father's birthplace.

[8] Minden sounded a "sundown siren" at 6pm almost every evening from 1917 until 2023, originally signifying that members of the Washoe Indian tribe were required to leave town by 6:30pm or face jail or fine.

In 2021, the State of Nevada passed a law that prohibits communities from sounding signals associated with a past law "which required persons of a particular race, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin or color to leave the town by a certain time."

… It never went off at 6:30, when the county had an ordinance to get Native Americans out of town.”[11][12][13][14] After another Nevada law targeting sundown sirens, S.B.

[10] Marty Meeden, a retired elementary school teacher of Washoe descent, expressed relief, saying, "Did you hear about the partially deaf senior woman who was verbalized for being in town after sunset?

Its location, east of the Sierra Nevada range, favors lee wave formation.

East of the Pine Nuts mountains is the Nevada desert, one of the best thermal generators in the world.

Minden has a cool semi-arid climate (Köppen BSk) with huge diurnal temperature variations during all seasons.

Rainfall is very rare during the summer as the monsoon practically never reaches this far north: in July more than four years in ten record no measurable precipitation and only one in twenty expects 1 inch or 25.4 millimetres.

Winter afternoons are warm enough in Minden that most precipitation occurs as rain, although the mean snowfall is 21.8 inches or 0.55 metres.