US 93 North of Vegas is awesome. You go through a bunch of cool little towns all the way up eastern Nevada with Ely being the best one. Then Twin Falls ID and Missoula MT up to the Canadian border where it becomes Canada 93, which runs just west of both Calgary and Edmonton.
Up until the pandemic my only visits through Nevada were about a dozen or so weekends to Las Vegas. Then, because of Covid, when work mandated I drive rather than fly for business trips, I took the chance to drive Nevada’s apocalyptically remote highways. It’s a wonder just how vastly unpopulated Nevada’s desert stretches are beyond its Reno and Las Vegas corners.
I started with traversing Highway 50 because just to see what a 1986 Life magazine article had in mind when declaring it “The Loneliest Road in America.” Subsequent trips unearthed highways even more remote, such as Nevada State Route 375, aka Extraterrestrial Highway that runs over top of Area 51.
For its noted emptiness, Nevada’s picture worthy rural highways are every bit the weird backcountry America of yesteryear: ghost towns, abandoned mineshafts, truck stop brothels (Mena & Amargosa Valley), vast ammunition depots (Hawthorne), Native American reservations in the far north, and swampy bird sanctuaries dotted along Highway 93 toward Ely.
Nevada State Route 375 - Extraterrestrial Highway, passing north of Area 51; never driven a more remote roadway:
Stokes Castle just west of Austin Nevada, a three-level, 1890s-built solo tower overlooking the Reese River valley from the Toiyabe Range to the Desatoya Mountains and the New Pass Range, a visual distance of approx 30 miles:
Ruins of a bank building in the Nevada Ghost town of Rhyolite, on the edge of Death Valley:
