Las Vegas & the Colorado River

Southern Nevada is a study in extremes. This is the Mojave corner of the state, the hot, dry tip where Nevada meets Arizona across the Colorado River and California across the dunes — a landscape of bare desert mountains and creosote flats that runs a hundred shades of brown until the light hits the red rock. And dropped into the middle of it is Las Vegas, the most artificial city in America, glittering in a basin that by every natural measure should not support it. The whole region runs on a single improbable resource: water, in a place that has almost none.

That paradox is written into the city's own history. Las Vegas began not as a casino town but as a spring — a creek-fed oasis the Spanish called las vegas, the meadows, where Mormon missionaries built an adobe way station in 1855 that still stands downtown as the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort. A century later the same valley grew the Las Vegas Strip, four miles of engineered spectacle that is, in a detail worth savoring, not technically in Las Vegas at all. The fort and the Strip sit a mile apart and a world apart, the two ends of the city's strange arc.

Point the car away from the neon and the desert reasserts itself fast. Fifteen miles west of the Strip, Red Rock Canyon throws up a striped sandstone escarpment three thousand feet high, its red Aztec rock capped by older gray limestone shoved over the top by the Keystone Thrust. An hour to the northeast, Valley of Fire — Nevada's oldest state park — burns brighter still, a basin of fire-colored stone scrawled with petroglyphs two and three thousand years old. The same Jurassic dunes underlie both; the desert here keeps its best color hidden just past the city limits.

And then there is the river that made all of it possible. The Colorado runs the region's southern and eastern edge, and thirty miles from the Strip it slams into Hoover Dam, the 726-foot Depression-era wall that tamed the river and powers the city. Behind it lies Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country and the most honest thing in southern Nevada — its bleached bathtub ring climbing higher every drought year, a plain reminder that the water which built this improbable place was never guaranteed to last. From the 1855 spring to the 1935 dam, the story of this corner of Nevada has always been about water in a country that has almost none.

Las Vegas & the Colorado River rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.