A Road Trip Guide

Nevada

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.

12 places · 1 region · 3 stories

All of Nevada, One Map

Tap any dot to discover what makes a place worth the stop.

Attraction

Cultural

Geological

Historical

Industrial

Natural

Recreational

Regions of Nevada

Each region gathers the parks, towns, drives, and roadside stops that define one corner of the state.

Region

Las Vegas & the Colorado River

Nevada's far south — beyond the neon, the red sandstone of Valley of Fire and Red Rock, the wall of Hoover Dam, and the long blue reach of Lake Mead.

Explore region →

Stories from Nevada

The histories behind the places — the people, the disasters, the inventions, and the long memory of the land.

Red Aztec sandstone in the foreground below the Red Rock Canyon escarpment, where pale gray limestone caps the red cliffs under a stormy sky.

Geology

The Sea Over the Sand

Red Rock's cliffs are a petrified Jurassic Sahara; Mount Charleston's gray summits are the floor of a vanished tropical sea lifted two miles into the sky; and at the seam between them an ancient fault shoved the sea-rock up and over the desert-rock, stacking southern Nevada's deep time the wrong way up.

JoAnn · 5 min read

Aerial view of Hoover Dam curving across Black Canyon, Lake Mead held back upstream and the Colorado River continuing downstream through bare desert mountains.

History

The Meadows and the River

A city named for desert grass it has long since used up, built first on a spring that ran dry and then on a river that is running low — southern Nevada's whole history, from an Ancestral Puebloan city to the wall of Hoover Dam, is a single long argument about water in a place that has almost none.

JoAnn · 7 min read

Vintage 1940s linen postcard of Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, lined with neon signs for the Pioneer Club, Las Vegas Club, and Overland Hotel, period cars on the street.

Culture

The City the Strip Forgot

The Las Vegas the world pictures — the Strip — sits four miles outside the city limits and implodes its own landmarks for sport; the real city is downtown, on the street where it began, and it has quietly become the one place in Nevada that bothers to remember.

JoAnn · 6 min read

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