Once a lawless boomtown, historic Pioche invites visitors to explore its colorful past. In its heyday, Pioche was home to about 10,000 residents, more than 10 times the number who call it home today.
Trip of the Week
Margo Bartlett Pesek writes about day trips from Las Vegas and information about the surrounding areas. Her column appears Sunday in Travel/Living.
Red Cliffs Recreation Area near St. George, Utah, is a scenic gem just off busy Interstate 15 along pretty Quail Creek.
The ghost town of Goodsprings, about 30 miles south of Las Vegas, was once the center of the richest mining district in Clark County.
The two-lane highway from Searchlight to Nipton, Calif., runs 21 miles through scenic high desert and rugged foothills. It often boasts a fair springtime show of desert wildflowers, many varieties of cactus and an extensive forest of Joshua trees.
State Route 170, the Bunkerville-Mesquite Loop Road, runs less than 15 miles along the banks of the Virgin River. It’s a peaceful side trip into history, a route that approximates the Old Spanish Trail.
Symbols of a bygone era, vintage railroad depots survive across Nevada. They represent an era when dozens of railroads connected Nevada’s boomtowns, mining camps and cities with the rest of the country.
Hoover Dam, which turns 80 years old this year, is an engineering marvel that attracts nearly a million visitors annually to its location on the Colorado River just 30 miles from Las Vegas
Scotty’s Castle is about 150 miles from Las Vegas. Follow Highway 95 north through Beatty to Scotty’s Junction. Questions about who owned the mansion existed for a long time because of tall tales told by Walter Scott, a colorful character better known as Death Valley Scotty.
A portion of Nevada’s colorful railroading past comes to life at the Nevada Southern Railroad Museum in Boulder City.
Travelers along some of Nevada’s major highways follow the historic footsteps of centuries-old trails. Head north into Utah on Interstate 15, or west into Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area and over the mountains into Pahrump Valley, and you retrace part of the Old Spanish Trail, the oldest transportation corridor in the state.
Experienced wildflower watchers know that you find some flowers in some places every year. You have to follow the water.
Springtime in the desert is the premier birdwatching season, when thousands of avian visitors follow a major international flyway northward as winter retreats.
The verdant Muddy River Valley, better known as Moapa Valley, assumes a quiet demeanor that belies a long and sometimes turbulent past.
The Mojave Desert contains extensive areas of mountainous sand dunes. Early travelers tried to avoid the sand, but today the sands attract many modern travelers, some for their sheer beauty, others for their recreational opportunities.
The 45,000-acre region of Southern Nevada known as the Logandale Trail System attracts outdoor enthusiasts of many kinds. More than 200 miles of roads and trails explore this scenic and historic area north of Valley of Fire State Park and west of the little town of Logandale, a pioneer-era community in a verdant valley along the Muddy River.
