Free
Not everything worth stopping for costs money, and a surprising amount of the West's best is free. These are the pull-offs and trailheads, the public-land overlooks, the small-town museums that ask only for a donation, the natural wonders no one thought to gate. Bring your own water and pack out your trash — free on public land runs on the honor system — and you can string together whole days of good country without paying a dime.
I-5 / US-501
Scenic Byway 126
Boulder Mountain
A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes
Escalante Interagency Visitor Center
Your essential stop before heading into the backcountry
Mossy Cave Trail
A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway
Red Canyon
A blazing red gateway carved by water and wind
The Hogback
A knife-edge ridge with 1000-foot drops on both sides
Upper Calf Creek Falls
A remote 88-foot cascade reached by a rugged trail
I-155
Hill Aerospace Museum
Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
Las Vegas Strip
Four and a quarter miles of engineered spectacle — the most famous street in America (and it isn't in Las Vegas)
Lehi Roller Mills
The flour mill from the movie Footloose
Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
An ancient rock art gallery hidden in a desert canyon
Temple Square
The spiritual and architectural heart of Salt Lake City
I-15 / I-701
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)2
I-191
S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1
S-22 / CA-781
UT-241
UT-251
Donner Pass Road (old US-40)1
I-40 / Historic Route 662
Holbrook
A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.
Winslow
The town an Eagles lyric made famous — and the home of La Posada, the last great railroad hotel and Mary Colter's finest work, at the southern doorway to Hopi and Navajo country.
I-40 / Historic Route 66 / US-931
UT-441
CA-49 / CA-201
CA-49 / Parrotts Ferry Road1
US-505
Austin
A silver boomtown that hit ten thousand and fell to under two hundred — the living ghost town at the high middle of US-50
Ely
The copper town and crossroads at the east end of the loneliest road — home of the Ghost Train and the gateway to Great Basin
Eureka
The Pittsburgh of the West, reborn — the best-preserved town on the loneliest road, with an 1880 opera house and a working 1879 courthouse
Grimes Point
Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art
Hickison Petroglyphs
Western Shoshone rock art cut into soft white tuff at a 6,500-foot summit — the easiest rock art to meet on the loneliest road
US-50 & US-3951
Pioneertown Road (off CA-62)1
Historic Route 661
Historic Route 66 (Foothill Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (Mt. Vernon Ave.)1
Historic Route 66 (National Old Trails Road)1
Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1
Historic Route 66 / I-401
Historic Route 66 terminus area1
Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1
I-701
I-808
Bonneville Salt Flats
A blindingly white desert where land speed records are born
California Trail Interpretive Center
A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.
Carlin & the Carlin Trend
The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
Elko
The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
Great Salt Lake
The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere
Reno
The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
Saltair
A haunting lakeside resort with a storied past
Winnemucca
The crossing town at the western end of the Humboldt — Basque tables, a 1900 bank robbery the town still pins on Butch Cassidy, and the spot where I-80 meets US-95.
US-897
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary
The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States
Big Rock Candy Mountain
The real mountain that inspired the famous hobo folk song
Jardine Juniper
One of the oldest living trees in the world at over 1,500 years old
Logan Canyon
A winding National Scenic Byway through limestone cliffs and alpine forest
Manti Temple
A striking pioneer-era temple crowning a hilltop above the Sanpete Valley
Manti-La Sal National Forest
Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert
Wind Cave Trail
A short hike to a triple-arched limestone cave overlooking the canyon
US-89 / US-61
US-89/911
US-931
US-954
Beatty
The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.
Fremont Street
Glitter Gulch — the neon canyon where Las Vegas actually began
Goldfield
Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.
Tonopah
The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.
Beal Road (off CA-111)1
CA-1111
CA-111 / CA-861
CA-111 / I-101
UT-1282
UT-1503
NV-1571
US-1632
CA-1781
US-1891
US-1913
NV-2061
UT-2111
UT-2241
NV-2251
NV-2271
UT-2611
UT-261 / US-1631
UT-2792
NV-3411
NV-374 / US-951
SR-3751
US-3954
Bishop
The Eastern Sierras working capital, and the home of the Nüümü who were traded out of their own valley.
Manzanar National Historic Site
A concentration camp on twice-taken ground, where the United States imprisoned more than eleven thousand of its own.
Owens Lake
Patsiata, the lake Los Angeles drank, and the most expensive dust in America.
Stewart Indian School
The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices
Whitney Portal Road (off US-395)1
Whitney Portal Road / Movie Road (off US-395)1
500 East1
700 East1
NV-7672
Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge
The desert's last thing you'd expect — a vast spring-fed marsh at the foot of the Ruby Mountains, one of the remotest refuges in the Lower 48 and a crossroads for two flyways of migrating birds.
Ruby Valley & Newe Sogobia
The valley where the Western Shoshone signed an 1863 treaty that ceded no land — and the heart of Newe Sogobia, a homeland the Newe say was never for sale.