Nevada
10 Ways to Get (Way) Out There in Nevada
Who needs a conventional vacation when you can have adventure with a side of quirky? Like a-forest-of-cars-turned-into-art kind of curious? For that, you have to visit Nevada. The Silver State welcomes the bizarre, celebrates the off-kilter, and nurtures the outrageous—from the sea-level sand beaches of the Colorado River to the towering peaks of Great Basin National Park. And all of it is happily served with some of the wildest adventures in the country. Here are ten ways to get a little out there in Nevada.
The Extraterrestrial Highway
With the U.S. government officially investigating unexplained sightings, the world has gone crazy for UFOs. Nevada? It’s been ground zero for the phenomenon for decades. Driving Nevada State Route 375 puts you in the heart of the mystery, passing as close as allowed to the Nevada National Security Site and the top-secret military base Area 51. You’ll also have the chance to snack on alien-themed jerky, take photos with out-of-this-world murals, and grab a burger at the UFO-themed Little A’Le’Inn. Just leave time to shop for souvenirs at the Alien Research Center, where a two-story silver alien welcomes you at the front door. The truth is right here.
Plan It: The Extraterrestrial Highway
Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary
Nothing gets the imagination going like a sky painted with stars. Is there life beyond our planet? Was that a meteor cruising across the sky—or something else? Nevada is home to some of the darkest skies in the lower 48, particularly at the Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary. In fact, this remote area located 150 miles north of Reno is so dark that it’s been designated one of the darkest places on Earth by DarkSky International. The rim is a 1,200-foot-tall escarpment that rises dramatically above a broad valley, giving you the perfect perch for spotting the show. Bring a telescope, or just your naked eye, and you’ll be able to see constellations like Orion’s Belt and gasp at the Milky Way, which on clear nights looks like an angel spilled fairy dust across the sky. There’s no bad time to see the stars, but for a real spectacle, show up on a moonless night in July or August when the Perseid meteor shower is at its most active. Camping? This is an extremely remote area with no services; BYO everything, and be prepared to be self-sufficient.
Plan It: Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary
Out There in Nevada
So many people think that Nevada is just the Strip and then a vast expanse of nothingness. They couldn’t be more wrong. Nevada is filled with hidden gems if you dare to explore. —Paulina Dao, photographer and adventurer
International Car Forest of the Last Church
Have you ever looked across a desert expanse and thought, “You know what this field needs? A bunch of junk cars sticking out of the ground.” Not likely. But that’s the inspiration that struck local artist Mark Rippie, who broke the Guinness world record for the largest car forest—a title he still holds. Located outside Goldfield, the International Car Forest of the Last Church boasts more than 40 cars, trucks, and buses sticking out of the ground. Walking through the car forest is a surreal stroll through the desert on a dusty path, which features sprouted vehicles fantastically decorated by artists from around the world. After exploring the art, take a stroll through Goldfield, a living ghost town (population around 250), which in the early 1900s was Nevada’s largest and richest city (population around 20,000).
Plan It: International Car Forest of the Last Church
Jarbidge
One of Nevada’s quirkiest charms? The remote outposts where modern pioneers are putting old mining towns back on the map. To experience one of the best, make the trek to Jarbidge, considered the most remote town in the lower 48, with a permanent population in the low double digits and no paved roads within 20 miles. Located at the bottom of a canyon, the historic town is the site of the last gold rush in America—and the last stage-coach robbery. Grab a drink in one (or both!) of the town’s two historic saloons. The Red Dog Saloon still sports the original bar top, while the Outdoor Inn has a full menu, as well as ten rooms and occasional musical performances on the front porch. You’ll also find working craftsmen like glassblowers and woodworkers operating studios on Main Street. Bonus: Jarbidge Wilderness Area is nearby and boasts 150 miles of hiking trails that traverse wildflower meadows and 11,000-foot peaks.
Plan It: Jarbidge
The Clown Motel
Clowns. They’re either a source of joy or the cause of great anxiety, depending on your perspective. Either way, you can lean into the wacky world of these colorful entertainers in Tonopah at the Clown Motel, which the owners call “America’s scariest motel.” Each room is decorated in wild circus colors, while the themed rooms go a bit further with decor evoking classic horror films like The Exorcist, IT, and Friday the 13th. It’s not all scares, though: There’s also a collection of more than 5,000 different clowns.
Plan It: The Clown Motel
Great Basin National Park
Here’s something really unusual: a gorgeous national park with near-zero crowds. While many national parks are busier than ever, Great Basin National Park, in eastern Nevada’s high desert, is one of the least visited units in the entire system. The 77,180-acre playground is packed with unusual finds, like the state’s only glacier, some of the oldest trees in the world, and an expansive cave system where scientists are still discovering new species of life.
Plan It: Great Basin National Park
Amargosa Big Dune Recreation Area
Nature puts on its own strange show in southwestern Nevada, where the sand sings to you. This rare phenomenon—which happens at only a few dozen places around the world—occurs when strong winds cause the sand to shift, creating a high-pitch singing sound. Amargosa Big Dune Recreation Area encompasses five square miles of shifting sand dunes, some of which are 500 feet tall. Located along the Free-Range Art Highway, Amargosa serves up the closest dunes to Las Vegas and is a popular destination for off-road enthusiasts, but it’s worth showing up just for the sweet song of mother nature.
Plan It: Amargosa Big Dune Recreation Area
Gold Butte National Monument
A trip here is about as close to time travel as most of us will get. At the 300,000-acre Gold Butte National Monument, petroglyphs transport visitors back 12,000 years to when Indigenous cultures created the area’s many paintings and carvings. And the rock art is just part of the attraction at Gold Butte, as the landscape is an otherworldly, Mars-like collection of red and tan sandstone outcroppings rising from the desert floor. Head to Little Finland, an area within the monument that boasts multiple panels of these pictures into the past, as well as surreal, goblin-shaped rock formations.
Plan It: Gold Butte National Monument
Guru Road and Black Rock Desert
The Black Rock Desert is totally unique: a 800,000–acre expanse of dry lake beds, hot springs, and canyons. Skirting it, the mile-long Guru Road accesses a series of open-air art exhibitions, from inspirational sayings painted onto stone to a larger-than-life tribute to Aphrodite. All of the art was created by artist DeWayne “Doobie” Williams, who found a creative way to stay busy during retirement. Wander this eclectic road and you’ll find stone tablets etched with aphorisms, a tribute to Elvis, and maybe strangest of all, the Desert Broadcasting System, which includes several TV frames, each offering panoramic views of the desert. After touring the artscape, explore the landscape. Off-road travel is popular in the adjacent Black Rock Desert, as is soaking in hot water. Head to Soldier Meadows Hot Springs for a hot tub with a desert view.
Plan It: Guru Road
Plan It: Black Rock Desert
Big Bend of the Colorado
A sandy swimming beach in the middle of the desert? Yeah, that’s a surprise. It’s also beautiful. And oh-so refreshing on a hot day. Big Bend of the Colorado State Recreation Area protects two miles of sandy beach along the Colorado River where the water is Caribbean clear. Before you take a dip, make a detour into the nearby resort town of Laughlin to take a contemplative stroll through the famous Laughlin Labyrinths.
Plan It: Big Bend of the Colorado
We’re Travel Nevada—your official resource for exploring the Silver State’s sometimes surprising, always exciting towns, cities, and public lands. With travel tips and inspiration straight from the heart of Nevada, we’ve got you covered. All you need to do is get a little out there.
The United States and Israel launched targeted attacks on Iran on Saturday. The move brought new uncertainty into global energy markets, as northern Nevadans could be paying more at the pump in the coming weeks.
Following the strikes, oil prices increased. Brent crude, the international benchmark, jumped to roughly $73 a barrel, while the national benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, traded above $67.
Much of the concern centers around the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman. which carries about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies.
Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis with GasBuddy, a price tracking company, spoke on the current questions in the region.
“The known would reduce oil prices if there becomes clarity, but it’s the unknown that is stoking fears…. If there is some sort of clarity in the days ahead, whether from Iran, the United States, or Israel, on how long this would last. We’d be able to put potentially an end date for the potential impacts that we’re seeing,” said de Haan.
Experts say for every $5 to $10 increase in oil prices, drivers could pay 15 to 25 cents more per gallon.
According to Triple-A, the average price of a gallon of gas in Nevada on Sunday comes in at $3.70, which comes in above the national average of roughly $2.98.
Over at the Rainbow Market on Vassar Street, prices sat just below four dollars a gallon on Sunday. Reno resident Abran Reyes talked about gas prices potentially going up.
“Whether it’s to work, to maybe run errands, to do stuff that helps you, gas is essential…. That gas price really hits, especially in today’s economy, where gas prices are extraordinary…. I just hope everyone’s safe. I hope our soldiers and all of our troops can be okay,” said Reyes.
More than 10,000 people have enrolled in Nevada’s new public option health plans, which debuted last fall with the expectation that they would bring lower prices to the health insurance market.
Those preliminary numbers from the open enrollment period that ended in January are less than a third of what state officials had projected. Nevada is the third state so far to launch a public option plan, along with Colorado and Washington state. The idea is to offer lower-cost plans to consumers to expand health care access.
But researchers said plans like these are unlikely to fill the gaps left by sweeping federal changes, including the expiration of enhanced subsidies for plans bought on Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
The public option gained attention in the late 2000s when Congress considered but ultimately rejected creating a health plan funded and run by the government that would compete with private carriers in the market. The programs in Washington state, Colorado, and Nevada don’t go that far — they aren’t government-run but are private-public partnerships that compete with private insurance.
In recent years, states have considered creating public option plans to make health coverage more affordable and to reduce the number of uninsured people. Washington was the first state to launch a program, in 2021, and Colorado followed in 2023.
Washington and Colorado’s programs have run into challenges, including a lack of participation from clinicians, hospitals, and other care providers, as well as insurers’ inability to meet rate reduction benchmarks or lower premiums compared with other plans offered on the market.
Nevada law requires that the carriers of the public option plans — Battle Born State Plans, named after a state motto — lower premium costs compared with a benchmark “silver” plan in the marketplace by 15% over the next four years.
But that amount might not make much difference to consumers with rising premium payments from the loss of the ACA’s enhanced tax credits, said Keith Mueller, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute.
“That’s not a lot of money,” Mueller said.
Three of the eight insurers on the state’s exchange, Nevada Health Link, offered the state plans during the open enrollment period.
Insurance companies plan to meet the lower premium cost requirement in Nevada by cutting broker fees and commissions, which prompted opposition from insurance brokers in the state. In response, Nevada marketplace officials told state lawmakers in January that they will give a flat-fee reimbursement to brokers.
The public option has faced opposition among state leaders. In 2024, a state judge dismissed a lawsuit, brought by a Nevada state senator and a group that advocates for lower taxes, that challenged the public option law as unconstitutional. They have appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Federal Policy Impacts
Recent federal changes create more obstacles.
Nevada is consistently among the states with the largest populations of people who do not have health insurance coverage. Last year, nearly 95,000 people in the state received the enhanced ACA tax credits, averaging $465 in savings per month, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
But the enhanced tax credits expired at the end of the year, and it appears unlikely that lawmakers will bring them back. Nationwide ACA enrollment has decreased by more than 1 million people so far this year, down from record-high enrollment of 24 million last year.
About 4 million people are expected to lose health coverage from the expiration of the tax credits, according to the Congressional Budget Office. An additional 3 million are projected to lose coverage because of other policy changes affecting the marketplace.
Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said the changes to the ACA in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, will make it more difficult for people to keep their coverage. These changes include more frequent enrollment paperwork to verify income and other personal information, a shortened enrollment window, and an end to automatic reenrollment.
In Nevada, the changes would amount to an estimated 100,000 people losing coverage, according to KFF.
“All of that makes getting coverage on Nevada Health Link harder and more expensive than it would be otherwise,” Giovannelli said.
State officials projected ahead of open enrollment that about 35,000 people would purchase the public option plans. Of the 104,000 people who had purchased a plan on the state marketplace as of mid-January, 10,762 had enrolled in one of the public option plans, according to Nevada Health Link.
Katie Charleson, communications officer for the state health exchange, said the original enrollment estimate was based on market conditions before the recent increases in customers’ premium costs. She said that the public option plans gave people facing higher costs more choices.
“We expect enrollment in Battle Born State Plans to grow over time as awareness increases and as Nevadans continue seeking quality coverage options that help reduce costs,” Charleson said.
According to KFF, nationally the enhanced subsidies saved enrollees an average of $705 annually in 2024, and enrollees would save an estimated $1,016 in premium payments on average in 2026 if the subsidies were still in place. Without the subsidies, people enrolled in the ACA marketplace could be seeing their premium costs more than double.
Insights From Washington and Colorado
Washington and Colorado are not planning to alter their programs due to the expiration of the tax credits, according to government officials in those states.
Other states that had recently considered creating public options have backtracked. Minnesota officials put off approving a public option in 2024, citing funding concerns. Proposals to create public options in Maine and New Mexico also sputtered.
Washington initially saw meager enrollment in its Cascade Select public option plans; only 1% of state marketplace enrollees chose a public option plan in 2021. But that changed after lawmakers required hospitals to contract with at least one public option plan by 2023. Last year the state reported that 94,000 customers enrolled, accounting for 30% of all customers on the state marketplace. The public option plans were the lowest-premium silver plans in 31 of Washington’s 39 counties in 2024.
A 2025 study found that since Colorado implemented its public option, called the Colorado Option, coverage through the ACA marketplace has become more affordable for enrollees who received subsidies but more expensive for enrollees who did not.
Colorado requires all insurers offering coverage through its marketplace to include a public option that follows state guidelines. The state set premium reduction targets of 5% a year for three years beginning in 2023. Starting this year, premium costs are not allowed to outpace medical inflation.
Though the insurers offering the public option did not meet the premium reduction targets, enrollment in the Colorado Option has increased every year it has been available. Last year, the state saw record enrollment in its marketplace, with 47% of customers purchasing a public option plan.
Giovannelli said states are continuing to try to make health insurance more affordable and accessible, even if federal changes reduce the impact of those efforts.
“States are reacting and trying to continue to do right by their residents,” Giovannelli said, “but you can’t plug all those gaps.”
Are you struggling to afford your health insurance? Have you decided to forgo coverage? Click here to contact KFF Health News and share your story.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Southern Nevada has a proud history of competing — and winning — through boldness and reinvention. We have developed a world-class tourism economy, built globally recognized brands and demonstrated our ability to rebound from significant disruptions. In today’s fiercely competitive global economy, however, we must intentionally design the next chapter of our economic story. Communities worldwide are continuously enhancing their sophistication, and we must keep pace.
Since joining the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance in late August of last year, I have consistently heard from community partners that we must diversify and enhance Southern Nevada’s economy. Our goal is to build upon and complement the strengths we already possess.
To achieve this, the alliance, as Southern Nevada’s regional economic development organization and designated Regional Development Agency, is embarking on a comprehensive strategic planning process. This initiative will guide our economic development priorities both in the near and long term, ensuring that we focus on areas that will yield the most positive impact.
The alliance has a history of reinvention, having been established in 1958 as the Southern Nevada Industrial Foundation, later becoming the Nevada Development Authority, and since 2011, operating under its current name in partnership with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Economic development extends beyond merely attracting companies. It encompasses the ability of local families to access high-wage careers, the opportunity for young people to build their futures at home and the resilience of our economy to withstand disruptions.
Over the past decade, Southern Nevada has made significant strides toward economic diversification, with investment outcomes in 2025 surpassing those of 2024. However, our work is far from complete. While tourism will always be a foundational strength and source of pride for our region, over-reliance on any single sector poses risks. A diversified economy enhances stability, and stability creates opportunities. We are united in our desire for more accessible housing, expanded health care and education, and greater upward mobility for our residents.
This strategic planning effort aims to ensure that the alliance and its partners concentrate on the right initiatives in the right manner. It will validate the region’s target industries and subsectors, narrowing our focus on areas where Southern Nevada has genuine competitive advantages and long-term potential. The planning process will include community interviews, focus groups and surveys to ensure our final strategy reflects the real opportunities and challenges facing Southern Nevada. We will establish flagship goals and a prioritized strategy matrix to direct our attention and resources toward meaningful outcomes.
A crucial aspect of this process involves clarifying roles within the broader economic ecosystem. Economic development is a team sport — when organizations replicate efforts, operate in silos or compete for recognition, the region loses valuable time and credibility, allowing opportunities to slip away. I have witnessed this behavior in various markets, serving as a red flag for prospective companies.
We have already made strides in building partnerships, exemplified by a Memorandum of Understanding signed in November 2025 with the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada to jointly support economic development education and advocacy for community leaders statewide.
Our strategic work will also include a organizational assessment of the alliance, evaluating our mission, resource deployment and engagement model. Economic impact requires operational excellence and measurable execution. Most importantly, this plan — which we anticipate completing by late April — will feature a three-year road map with clear timelines, recommended actions and meaningful metrics to transparently track our progress. A longtime mentor of mine often said, “What gets watched gets measured, and what gets measured gets done.”
Las Vegas has always taken the initiative to shape its own future. This strategic plan presents an opportunity for us to do what we do best: come together, think bigger, act smarter and create something lasting. Together, we can build a purposeful and resilient economic future for Southern Nevada.
Danielle Casey is president and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance.
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