Practical

No Cell Service

18 destinations along 17 roads

Out here, dead zones are the rule, not the exception — whole counties where the last bar drops past the on-ramp and doesn't come back for hours. These stops sit in that silence, which is part of the appeal and part of the risk. Download your maps before you leave pavement, tell someone your route, and don't count on calling for help. A paper map and a full tank cover most of it. The reward is the thing the signal was drowning out.

Scenic Byway 122

Boulder

One of the last places in America to receive paved road access

Boulder Mountain

Boulder

A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes

CO-141

Pawnee Buttes

Keota

Two remnants of a vanished plain on a grassland the government bought back from Dust Bowl homesteaders in the 1930s.

NM-151

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

Silver City

Rooms built into five caves above a Gila side canyon in the late 1270s and lived in for about a generation, at the end of forty-four winding miles of mountain road from Silver City.

Historic Route 661

Grand Canyon Caverns

Peach Springs

The largest dry cavern in the country, 210 feet under Route 66 — a Cold War fallout shelter, the deepest hotel room in America, and a Hualapai burial place the tourists once mistook for a sideshow.

I-701

San Rafael Swell

Castle Dale

A massive dome of exposed rock layers with slot canyons and natural bridges

I-801

Metropolis

Wells

A planned farm city with a brick hotel and street lights, undone by a lawsuit from farmers at the far end of the same river.

SR-881

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

The 1904 road built to raise Roosevelt Dam, still barely tamed

US-2121

Beartooth Highway

Red Lodge

A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

NV-2251

Jarbidge

The end of the road, twice over — Nevada's most isolated town, deep in a canyon on the Idaho line, where the West's last gold rush and its last stagecoach robbery both played out.

UT-261 / US-1631

Valley of the Gods

Mexican Hat

A free, uncrowded alternative to Monument Valley

MT-3141

Rosebud Battlefield State Park

Lodge Grass

The ridges where Crook's column was stopped eight days before the Little Bighorn, remembered by the Cheyenne for one woman's ride.

NV-7671

Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge

Ruby Valley

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.