The atlas holds more than 1,400 entries across five states. That is a good thing to search and a harder thing to plan from, because a list of dots does not tell you which dots share a road, which pair of them makes a sane day, or which one is worth the four hours of driving it costs to reach. What follows are three routes that answer those questions. Each runs two to four days out of Las Vegas, each is assembled from places already in the atlas, and each is specific about where the pavement ends.
They go north, northwest, and west, because that is how the roads out of the southern Nevada basin actually run. The three directions give you three different deserts. North on US 93 is state parks, charcoal kilns, and a national park almost nobody visits. Northwest on US 95 is the silver-camp corridor — Goldfield, Tonopah, and the Monitor Valley towns behind them. West is Death Valley and the Owens Valley, which pack more famous ground into fewer miles than anywhere else in the Southwest.
Four rules that apply to all three
Season. Late October through early April, and it is the best time to be out here anyway — cool mornings, long low light, and thin traffic. It is also the safe window: summer daytime temperatures on unshaded desert ground are a genuine hazard, and the National Park Service is explicit that in that heat a vehicle failure stops being an inconvenience and becomes a survival problem. The inversion is that the high country closes in winter: the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive in Great Basin National Park and White Mountain Road above Big Pine are both snowbound for months. Routes 1 and 3 therefore have a narrow shoulder-season window at the top end — roughly late spring through early fall for the alpine segments — and a cool-season window for everything below 5,000 feet. Route 2 works any time the roads are dry.
Fuel. Fill up in the last real town, not after it. On these three routes that means Alamo, Caliente, Panaca, or Ely on the US 93 run; Beatty, Goldfield, or Tonopah on the US 95 run; and Beatty, Stovepipe Wells, Panamint Springs, or Lone Pine on the western route. These are good towns to stop in and they keep small-town hours. Buy fuel while you are there rather than counting on the next one being open.
Pavement. Every route below is written so the spine is paved and any dirt is optional and called out. That matters because routing software does not know the difference. Death Valley’s own guidance is clear about it — do not navigate by GPS alone in that country, because it will happily send you down closed, washed-out, and dead-end mining roads. Download offline maps while you still have signal, and carry a paper map.
Conditions, the day you travel. Everything below is prose, and prose goes stale the moment a road washes out or a repair schedule slips. Check Nevada 511 and Caltrans QuickMap for the highways, and the relevant park’s own conditions page for anything inside a park boundary.
Route 1 — The Great Basin Highway: Las Vegas to the bristlecones
Three days, US 93 north and back. This is the least-known of the three and the easiest to drive. It is nearly all paved, the traffic thins out an hour north of Las Vegas and never comes back, and it ends at one of the least-visited national parks in the lower forty-eight.
Day 1 — Las Vegas to Panaca, with stops. US 93 north. The drive to Cathedral Gorge is roughly 165 miles and two and a half to three hours of driving. Give the day more than that, because the stops along the way are the point.
Pahranagat NWR is the first one, about 90 miles up, and it is genuinely strange: 5,380 acres of cottonwood, marsh, and open water strung along the highway in the middle of the Mojave, on the Pacific Flyway. Waterfowl, shorebirds, mule deer, and pronghorn. Free day-use, roads and trails open, primitive camping at Upper Lake. Spring and fall migration are the reason to be there.
A few miles further on, the Ash Springs Rock Art Site sits on a low hill just off the highway — a BLM site interpreted with Lincoln County, with a trailhead register and a brochure, and a 0.3-mile marked loop past roughly eighteen numbered stops. Bighorn, human figures, atlatls, abstract designs, all pecked into desert-varnished boulders at what was a winter camp. It is fifteen minutes of walking for one of the more legible rock-art sites in the state. Rock art is protected under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act: photograph it, and do not touch, chalk, wet, or otherwise “enhance” a panel.
If you have the time and want more of that, the alternate northbound leg is SR-318 instead of US 93, which puts you past White River Narrows — a National Register archaeological district in a winding canyon of rhyolite tuff, and one of eastern Nevada’s largest publicly accessible rock-art concentrations, with panels spanning roughly four thousand years. Signed dirt spur, kiosk, numbered stops, no fee. It costs you an hour or two and rejoins the route near Ely rather than at Panaca, so it works better as a variant than an add-on.
Back on US 93: Kershaw-Ryan State Park is a short paved detour south from Caliente and worth it. Spring-fed canyon, rainbow-banded walls up to about 700 feet, wild grapes and Gambel oak, roughly fourteen miles of trail, day use and a campground. Established 1935 on an old homestead. Wild horses and deer come to the water.
End the day at Cathedral Gorge near Panaca. The park is soft bentonite clay eroded into spires, organ-pipe walls, and narrow alleys — the slot corridors are short but genuinely cave-like, and the whole place is uncrowded in a way that Utah’s canyon country stopped being decades ago. As of mid-2026 day use runs $5 per vehicle for Nevada plates and $10 out-of-state; the campground is 22 sites with year-round water and flush restrooms, $15 a night for Nevada plates, $20 otherwise, plus $10 for a utility hookup, with a 14-day stay limit. Check the state parks fee page before you count on those numbers, and check current fire restrictions before you plan a campfire.
Day 2 — Panaca to Ely. Walk the narrows first. The slots read best near midday, when light actually reaches the bottom of them, which is the opposite of most landscape advice and is why the gorge rewards a slow morning.
Then north to Pioche, fifteen minutes up the highway. Pioche was one of the more violent camps in early Nevada, and the town’s own telling is that its Boot Hill held seventy-five graves by 1872 before anyone died of natural causes. The Million Dollar Courthouse still stands — so named because a bond issue turned a modest building into a million-dollar debt that outlived the mines. It is a living town, not a ruin, and the mining works on the hillside above it are the real photographic subject.
From Pioche it is a long, empty, paved two hours north to Ely. Before you get there, turn off for the Ward Charcoal Ovens: six beehive kilns of stacked stone, thirty feet tall, built in 1876 to burn charcoal for the Ward silver smelter and abandoned by 1879. They are on the National Register and they are the best-preserved structures of their kind in Nevada — you can walk inside them, and the acoustics are unreasonable. Access is via Cave Valley Road about twenty miles south of Ely, at the standard state park day-use rate — $5 per vehicle for Nevada plates, $10 out-of-state, as of mid-2026.
Ely is the overnight. Two things nearby if the day still has light in it: Garnet Hill, a free BLM recreation area that has been a designated rockhounding site since 1970, where deep red almandine garnets sit in weathered rhyolite — reached by a graded road off US 50 near the Ruth turnoff — and Cave Lake State Park, a small reservoir at about 7,300 feet in the Schell Creek Range with camping, trout, and elk in the pinyon-juniper. Garnet Hill is the one place on any of these three routes where casual collecting is both legal and expected; the general rules for that, and the much longer list of places where they do not apply, are in the southern Nevada rockhounding guide.
Day 3 — Great Basin National Park. About seventy miles east of Ely on US 6/50, then south on NV 487/488 to Baker. There is no park entrance fee at Great Basin — cave tours and campgrounds charge separately, but getting in is free, which is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.
The Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive climbs twelve paved miles at grades around eight percent to a trailhead just under 10,000 feet. Vehicles over 24 feet are barred past Upper Lehman Creek Campground. The road is seasonally snow-closed and its opening date moves every year with the melt, so this is the single hardest thing on any of these routes to plan around: check the park’s conditions page before you commit, and have a fallback. When it is open, the Bristlecone Trail runs about 2.8 miles round trip from the end of the drive to the Great Basin bristlecone grove on a glacial moraine — trees over four thousand years old, standing where nothing else will grow. No permit. Budget two to three hours and expect the altitude to be noticeable.
If you are fit, acclimatized, and starting early, Wheeler Peak itself is Nevada’s second-highest summit at 13,063 feet, roughly 8.6 miles round trip and about 3,000 feet of climb from Wheeler Peak Campground. That is a full day and a different trip; do not bolt it onto a drive home.
The way back is US 93 south, the same road, and it is a long one — plan on getting home late or splitting it at Ely or Caliente. Everything on this route is listed under Lincoln County and White Pine County.
Route 2 — US 95 north: the silver camps
Two to three days, northwest. Beatty and the Bullfrog district — Rhyolite, the Cook Bank shell, the bottle house — are covered properly in the Beatty gateway guide and the Bullfrog ghost towns guide, so this route picks up where those leave off, north of Beatty on US 95. Treat Beatty as either the first night or a fuel stop, depending on how early you left Las Vegas.
North to Goldfield. An hour up US 95 from Beatty. In 1907 Goldfield was the largest city in Nevada with about 30,000 people, built on roughly $86 million in gold, and the collapse was fast enough that the street grid never got redeveloped. Grand masonry buildings still line Main Street, the Goldfield Hotel is still standing, and on 3 September 1906 the town staged one of the defining prizefights of the era — Joe Gans against Battling Nelson for the world lightweight championship, promoted by Tex Rickard as an advertisement for the boom and settled in the forty-second round on a foul. It is a functioning small town wrapped around the bones of a much larger one, which makes it a more complicated place to photograph than a clean ruin and a better one to walk.
The worthwhile detour is Gold Point, southwest on paved road plus a short dirt run. It was Lime Point, then Hornsilver for its silver ore, then Gold Point in the 1930s when gold took over. Dozens of original buildings survive because the townsite is privately maintained as a living museum, which is the only reason there is anything left to see. It is private property with its owners’ rules rather than open desert, so ask when you arrive — the people who kept it standing are the ones to ask anyway.
The corridor either side of town carries two collecting entries: an honor-system agate field a couple of miles south of Goldfield on US 95, with a donation box, and — further north near Coaldale Junction — extensive obsidian flows on BLM ground, tool-grade black glass that Great Basin peoples worked for thousands of years. Both are region-level entries, and the collecting rules that apply are the federal ones: reasonable personal-use amounts, hand tools, public land only. The rockhounding guide has the specifics.
Tonopah. Half an hour further north, past Millers — a Tonopah & Goldfield railroad and milling camp founded in 1904 whose concrete mill and power-plant ruins sit beside the modern US 95 rest area, with a state historical marker to explain them. Tonopah itself is where you sleep. The Tonopah Historic Mining Park is a 113-acre outdoor museum built on the original silver-camp ground, covering four historic companies including the Mizpah and the Desert Queen, with headframes, hoist houses, a visitor center, and an optional walk out the Burro Tunnel to an overlook down an underground stope. It is on Burro Avenue in town and typically open nine to five. If you have spent the trip so far looking at ruins with no explanation attached, this is the corrective — the same industry, interpreted.
Day 3, the Monitor Valley run. This is the day that justifies the trip. Belmont is about fifty miles northeast of Tonopah — the last stretch dirt, but ordinary two-wheel-drive dirt in dry weather — and it is one of the most intact silver camps in the state: the 1876 Nye County Courthouse stands roofless but solid, alongside mill ruins, a saloon foundation, and a cemetery, under state monument protection. On the way you pass Manhattan, a gold camp that boomed in 1905, boomed again in the 1930s on placer dredging, and never quite finished dying; a handful of people still live there and the dredge tailings run the length of the canyon.
The alternative day 3, if you want distance instead of density, is Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park — a couple of hours northwest by way of Gabbs, paved to the park. It is the only place on earth where you can walk an intact ghost town and stand over 225-million-year-old marine reptile fossils in the same visit. Berlin still has its mill, assay office, and miners’ cabins, and the fossil shelter protects the largest known concentration of Shonisaurus bones anywhere. National Natural Landmark since 1973; day use is the standard state park rate, $5 per vehicle for Nevada plates and $10 out-of-state as of mid-2026.
Both options are one-way commitments; pick one. If you take the Belmont day, the Lunar Crater Volcanic Field sits east of Tonopah off US 6 — a hundred-plus vents and cinder cones and a clean maar crater, dirt access, high-clearance recommended, and close enough to the Moon’s surface that NASA trained Apollo astronauts there. It is a third day in its own right rather than a stop.
Everything on this route is under Esmeralda County and Nye County.
Route 3 — Death Valley to the White Mountains
Four days, west. This is the long one, and it is the itinerary most people describe badly, because they try to run Las Vegas to Death Valley to the Alabama Hills to the bristlecone forest as a weekend. It is not a weekend. Done properly it is four days with one long transit day in the middle, and it crosses several mountain ranges and about ten thousand feet of vertical between the lowest point in North America and a forest near 10,000 feet.
Day 1 — into the park. Las Vegas to Death Valley via US 95 and NV 374 over Daylight Pass, roughly two and a half hours to the park boundary. Entrance is $30 per private vehicle for seven days as of 2026, and the park is card and digital payment only — it does not take cash. Inside, the standard first day is the Furnace Creek axis: Zabriskie Point at sunrise if you got an early enough start, otherwise late light; Badwater Basin and its salt polygons at 282 feet below sea level; and Harmony Borax Works, where the twenty-mule-team wagons started in 1883 and the processing vats still sit on the flats. Sleep at Stovepipe Wells or Furnace Creek.
Two standing caveats on this side of the park. The Titus Canyon one-way road was open after repairs as of mid-2026 but was slated to close again from October 2026 through September 2027 for further work — verify before you build a day around it. And Scotty’s Castle has been closed indefinitely, along with the access road running west from Bonnie Claire, so do not plan a park entry that way.
Day 2 — across the park and out the west side. Start at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes near Stovepipe Wells at sunrise — the most accessible dunes in the park, rising to about a hundred feet, with star, transverse, and barchan forms all present in one field. Then CA-190 west over Towne Pass. If the day is generous, drop south on Emigrant Canyon Road to the Wildrose Charcoal Kilns: ten beehive kilns at around 6,800 feet, built in 1877 by the Modock Consolidated Mining Company to fuel smelters in the Argus Range, out of use by about 1879, and among the best-preserved in the West. The last couple of miles are gravel and usually fine for a passenger car when dry. If you saw the Ward ovens on Route 1, this is the same technology at ten times the scale.
Continue west past Panamint Springs. Darwin Falls is a two-mile round trip up a dirt spur to a spring-fed waterfall that runs year-round — an actual waterfall, in Death Valley, which is worth the detour on absurdity alone. Father Crowley Vista Point is a signed paved pullout a few miles on, looking down into Rainbow Canyon; the military low-level training route through that canyon is why there is usually someone there with a long lens.
Down to US 395 at Olancha, then north. If you have light left, Fossil Falls is a short dirt spur east of the highway south of Little Lake — a dry basalt cataract where the ancestral Owens River poured over a lava dam and polished the rock into potholes. Sleep in Lone Pine.
Day 3 — Owens Valley. Alabama Hills at sunrise, from Movie Flat Road west of town: rounded granite piled against the Sierra escarpment with Mount Whitney on the skyline, and the short Mobius Arch loop as the standard first walk. Graded dirt, fine for most cars when dry, free BLM access, and no water or shade at the lot. It is a National Scenic Area with its own management rules — check them before you plan to camp rather than assuming the desert defaults.
Then Manzanar, nine miles north on US 395. The War Relocation Center where the United States incarcerated Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945 is now an NPS site with a visitor center, a reconstructed barracks block, the cemetery monument, and a self-guided driving tour of the camp footprint. Entry is free. Give it half a day rather than an hour; it is the most substantial thing on this route and the least like the rest of it.
The afternoon has two directions. South and east, Keeler on SR-136 is the near-ghost shipping town on the dry east shore of Owens Lake — smelter and soda-works ruins, the abandoned depot, and a California Historical Landmark furnace, at the end of what was the Carson & Colorado narrow gauge. The lake itself is a vast alkali playa laced with dust-control berms and shallow ponds, best from highway pull-offs and public levee roads; stay out of the active industrial work zones. Above Keeler, Cerro Gordo was one of California’s richest silver-lead mines, and the townsite at about 8,500 feet survives because it is privately conserved. Day visits require checking in, and the road up is steep dirt that wants high clearance, so arrange the visit before you point the truck at it.
North instead, and the Laws Railroad Museum northeast of Bishop preserves the 1883 narrow-gauge depot and yard of the same Carson & Colorado line that terminated at Keeler, with rolling stock and an Owens Valley collection. The two ends of one railroad, seventy-odd road miles apart, is a better day than either alone.
Day 4 — the White Mountains. From Big Pine, CA-168 east and then White Mountain Road north to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest at Schulman Grove, around 10,000 feet on the White Mountains crest. Some of the oldest living trees on earth; a visitor center, the Discovery Trail, and the longer Methuselah loop. Inyo National Forest manages it and the road is typically open mid-May through October and snowbound the rest of the year — the same seasonal problem as Wheeler Peak on Route 1, and the reason this route and that one cannot both be run in deep winter. If you did Great Basin’s grove in the same year, note that these are the same species growing under the same brutal logic on the other side of the state line.
Home is US 395 south to CA-14 and I-15, or back east through the park. Both are long; leave early.
Where this route ends, and where it does not. The natural instinct is to keep going west — Owens Valley to the Sierra to the coast ranges, and on to Carrizo Plain and the central California grasslands. That is a real trip and the atlas covers the far end of it, but it is not this trip: from Big Pine it is another long day of driving through country that has nothing to do with the desert you just crossed. Run it separately, in spring, for the wildflowers and the San Andreas Fault. Stopping at the bristlecones is not a compromise — it is the correct ending, because the forest is what the whole climb has been building toward.
Everything on this route is under Death Valley and Inyo County.
Choosing between them
If you have three days and have never been to eastern Nevada, take Route 1 — it has the best ratio of interest to effort and the fewest people. If you want ghost towns specifically, Route 2 is the densest concentration of intact ones within a day of Las Vegas. If you have four days and want the famous ground, take Route 3 and expect company on it.
If you have two days, do the first half of one route and turn around rather than compressing the whole thing. All three reward the same approach: treat the drive as part of what you came for, because on these roads it is most of it.
Around it
Every place named above has its own page; the full lists are at Nevada, California, and ghost towns across the atlas. The other guides are at /guides/. All of it is on the map.
Sources: NPS — Great Basin National Park, Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive · NPS — Great Basin conditions · NPS — Great Basin fees · NPS — Death Valley alerts and conditions · NPS — Death Valley entrance fees · NPS — Death Valley directions · NPS — Death Valley summer guide · NPS — Manzanar National Historic Site · USFS — Inyo National Forest · USFWS — Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge · Nevada State Parks — Cathedral Gorge · Nevada State Parks — park directory · Nevada State Parks — fees · BLM — Ely District · BLM — Alabama Hills · BLM — rockhounding on public lands · Nevada 511 road conditions · Caltrans QuickMap