Your road trip starts here.

From the red-rock canyon country of the south to the alpine Wasatch in the north — five national parks, a hundred ghost towns, and more empty road than almost anywhere left in the country.

Past the neon and out the other side — the loneliest roads in America, silver-boom ghost towns, a drowned city under Lake Mead, and the desert the Strip makes you forget.

From the rim of the Grand Canyon down to the saguaro country of the Mexican border — the longest surviving stretch of Route 66, the homelands of twenty-two tribal nations, red-rock canyons, and mining towns that outlived their mines.

From the Colorado River crossing of Route 66 to its end on the Santa Monica Pier — Death Valley's below-sea-level basins, the gold country of the Mother Lode, the granite passes of the Sierra, and the desert California the coast never sees.

From the Canadian line down to the Great Basin — Hells Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America, the black lava of Craters of the Moon, the Oregon Trail along the Snake River, and the homelands of five sovereign tribal nations.

From the mouth of the Columbia to the sagebrush of the high desert — Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the country, the end of the Oregon Trail in the Willamette Valley, ocean beaches open to everyone by law, and the homelands of nine federally recognized tribal nations.

From Cape Flattery to the Palouse — the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula, the volcanoes of the Cascades, the coulees the Ice Age floods cut through the basalt, the Columbia's long run to the sea, and the homelands of twenty-nine federally recognized tribal nations.

From the Continental Divide out onto the high plains — Going-to-the-Sun Road across Glacier, the Little Bighorn where the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho defeated Custer, the Missouri that Lewis and Clark climbed, Butte's hill of copper, and the homelands of twelve tribal nations.

From the geysers of Yellowstone out onto the shortgrass plains — the Tetons standing straight up out of Jackson Hole, Bear Lodge, which the maps call Devils Tower, Oregon Trail ruts cut into the sandstone at Guernsey, the first government anywhere to give women the vote, and the Wind River homeland of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho.

From the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde out onto the shortgrass plains — the passes and mining towns of the San Juans, the headwaters of the Colorado River, Tava-kaavi, which the maps call Pikes Peak, Sand Creek, where the army massacred Cheyenne and Arapaho people in 1864, and the homeland of the Nuuchiu, the Ute people.

From the Four Corners down to the Chihuahuan Desert — the great houses of Chaco Canyon, Santa Fe at the end of the trail from Missouri, the white gypsum of White Sands, the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was tested, and the homelands of twenty-three tribal nations, nineteen of them Pueblos.