Off the Beaten Path
The beaten path exists for a reason — it's paved, marked, and goes where most people want to go. This is the rest of it: stops down a washboard road, past the last sign, an hour from the nearest coffee. The reward is space and quiet and the feeling of having found something yourself. The cost is real: carry water and a spare, tell someone your plan, and don't rely on a phone. Out here, self-reliance isn't a vibe — it's the ticket in.
Sir Francis Drake Blvd, off CA-1 at Olema1
US-21
NM-41
San Francisquito Canyon Rd., off I-51
W. Pico Canyon Rd., off I-51
US-6 / US-501
MT-72
UT-101
NM-111
Scenic Byway 126
Boulder
One of the last places in America to receive paved road access
Boulder Mountain
A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes
Escalante
The town that gave Grand Staircase-Escalante its name
Hells Backbone Grill
A farm-to-table pioneer in the middle of nowhere
Henrieville
A blink-and-you-will-miss-it ranching hamlet
Upper Calf Creek Falls
A remote 88-foot cascade reached by a rugged trail
US-121
UT-122
CO-141
I-153
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)2
NM-151
SR-183
Baldwin Lake Ecological Reserve
Pebble plains occur in this valley and nowhere else on earth, and the flowers on them are small enough that you have to lie down.
Doble
Three men with money reopened this mine and all three failed. The town is named after the second one.
Keller Peak Fire Lookout
For ninety-eight years it watched this forest for smoke. In September 2024 a fire took it, and the steel frame is what is left.
Highway 241
MT-241
UT-241
Hunt Road, off SR-25 near Eden1
I-252
Fishers Peak State Park
The flat-topped landmark over Trinidad and Raton Pass, a trophy-hunting ranch until 2019 and Colorado's second-largest state park since 2020, with a summit trail since 2023.
Ludlow Tent Colony Site
The coal miners' union bought the ground, raised a granite monument over the pit in 1918, and restored it after someone knocked the heads off its figures in 2003.
UT-251
NV-28 / US-50 (Spooner Summit)1
SR-28 at Tendoy; Agency Creek Road1
US-30 between Hagerman and Buhl1
OR-311
UT-311
SR-33; N 12000 E road1
ID-341
SR-381
Donner Pass Road (old US-40)1
I-40 / Historic Route 661
UT-441
SR-47 (Mesa Falls Scenic Byway)1
Tyler Foote Crossing Road (off CA-49)1
US-506
Amache National Historic Site
A Japanese American incarceration camp kept from vanishing by a Granada social studies teacher and three decades of his high school students, a national park unit since 2024.
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
Great Basin National Park
Nevada's only national park — caves below, the oldest trees on earth above, the darkest skies overhead
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
NM-532
El Malpais National Monument
The badlands south of Grants: lava 3,900 years old from McCartys Crater, a tube system at least seventeen miles long, and an old trail across four lava flows between Zuni and Acoma.
El Morro National Monument
A sandstone headland with a pool at its foot, where Puebloan people, Spanish governors and American soldiers all left their marks, until carving became illegal in 1906.
US-541
SR-551
US-603
Oak Flat
Chi'chil Bildagoteel — the Apache sacred ground a copper mine is set to swallow
Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument
Three Spanish mission churches raised over Tiwa and Tompiro pueblos east of the Manzano Mountains in the 1600s, each of its own stone, and one never finished.
Salt River Canyon
US-60's switchback plunge into the gorge that divides two Apache nations
US-60 / SR-2601
US-60 / US-1801
US-641
Historic Route 661
Historic Route 66 (National Old Trails Road)1
Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1
Historic Route 66 / I-401
I-701
SR-731
SR-75; Yankee Fork Road1
I-762
Julesburg
The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
Sterling Tree Sculptures
A plains town that answered dying shade trees by handing their trunks to a young local carver, and became the City of Living Trees.
Silver City Road, off SR-78 near Murphy1
I-803
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.
Metropolis
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.
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.
SR-801
OR-821
US-841
SR-87 / SR-2871
US-872
Decision Point
The rise where Lewis and Clark spent ten days in 1805 deciding which river was the Missouri, against nearly every man in the party.
Fort Assinniboine
The brick border post whose Buffalo Soldiers deported the Cree in 1896, and whose land became the Cree's reservation twenty years later.
SR-881
SR-89A1
US-894
Butch Cassidy Boyhood Home
The restored Circleville cabin where the West's most famous outlaw spent his teens
Jardine Juniper
One of the oldest living trees in the world at over 1,500 years old
Manti-La Sal National Forest
Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert
Sterling
A highway hamlet and the doorway to Palisade State Park
US-89/911
I-902
US-933
Jackpot
A casino town made by an Idaho law, a mile inside the Nevada line, that still keeps Idaho's clock.
Pioche
The silver camp that, by legend, out-killed the Old West — Boot Hill's boots-on graves, the graft-ridden Million-Dollar Courthouse, and an aerial tramway still slung over Main Street.
Ward Charcoal Ovens
Six great stone beehives in the Egan Range — the best-preserved charcoal kilns in Nevada, and the intact relic of the fuel that fed every silver smelter
US-93; Doublespring Pass Road1
I-941
US-953
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.
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.
US-95; Forest Road 5171
UT-951
CO-961
UT-1011
CA-1111
CA-111 / CA-861
WY-1201
CA-127 at CA-1901
UT-1282
UT-1371
CO-1391
UT-1501
SR-1551
CO-1591
White Mountain Road (off CA-168)1
CA-1781
US-1801
CO-1841
US-1912
MT-2001
OR-2054
Alvord Desert
A twelve-mile playa in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain where, in December 1976, a deaf stuntwoman drove a rocket car to a women's land speed record she was not allowed to push past.
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
A lake-and-marsh refuge set aside for its birds in 1908 that had to buy a river's water to keep them, and now fights the carp that have eaten away its marshes.
Pete French Round Barn
A round barn from the 1880s, built for breaking and training stock, the best-known relic of a cattle empire that ended when its owner was shot dead by a homesteader.
Steens Mountain
A single tilted block of the earth's crust thirty miles long that rises gently from the west and drops a mile on the east, its top carved by glaciers into gorges two thousand feet deep.
SR-2201
NV-2251
NV-2271
MT-2401
UT-2611
UT-261 / US-1631
SR-2641
SR-2731
SR-2911
MT-3081
UT-3131
MT-3141
NV-3411
NV-374 / US-951
SR-3751
US-3801
US-3851
US-3951
NV-4451
NM-4671
US-5501
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.