Stars, little green-ish men and clowns: Granted, you can find all of these prowling the Las Vegas strip on any given night but you need to probe deeper into Nevada, USA, for spiritually closer encounters with all three.
Have you ever really looked at the stars? For what they are, rather than a cursory glance?
I know of the North Star, of course. The Sun, trick question. Big…Dipper? I’m pretty sure that looks like a spoon if you squint and play pretend. But I’d be lying if I said I’ve ever truly seen anything more than the highway of the universe’s tiny headlights far away and passively glinting.
Just there like cosmic wallpaper.
Would I, uninitiated, travel across the world to look at the stars? No chance.
I love a good deal and pinch pennies like Martin Lewis begrudgingly playing the coin pusher machine at an amusement arcade. Travelling over 5,000 miles to see sky when we have sky at home? Idiotic! Or so I thought…
Those not native to the US state and wanting to experience the full astrological show that Nevada has to offer will most likely have to fly into one of Vegas’ airports and embark on a full-bodied American road trip of the southern state’s south, passing through the splintered communities surviving where no substantial vegetation apart from Joshua Trees do.
It’s a harsh desert so wild that the powers that be pummelled it with 1,021 nuclear detonations and left it to bake after looting it of its precious metals.
The town of Beatty, just knocking on Death Valley’s door, is not much more than a trucker’s pit-stop living in the shadow of its own history and now offering life’s most basic amenities: A Denny’s diner on a gas station forecourt just a dozen steps away from, and under the same roof as, a strip-joint-casino in the same hotel. It’s a state of simple pleasures homing some ‘Murica towns with a loud M.
A Great Nevada Trip will weave you through ghost towns – like Beatty’s Rhyolite – and ‘living’ ghost towns that feel like old Hollywood movie sets with real-life interactivity and without any Legoland pretend world-building – like the next town on, Goldfield.
Richard and Astrid, of Enigmata Estorica, left teaching jobs in Washington state to start artistic endeavours afresh in Goldfield, NV, and haven’t looked back since.
If freedom is what America is fighting for, rural Nevada has won the battle.
‘Battle born’ is the state motto, after all. Even if battles are decided on the flip of a coin or the roll of dice.
‘It’s like the Wild West out here,’ Astrid tells me.
‘Heads of local government have won elections in the event of a tie by drawing from a deck of cards.
‘We’ve had both candidates draw Jacks. But spades trump diamonds.
‘Vegas and Reno are like two different countries. Very different outlooks. They vote differently. And the rest [of Nevada] is just…there.’
There. Like the stars.
There are no stars over Las Vegas. Because a) light pollution, and b) the overhanging eternal deep does not want to see what you get up to in Sin City. Whereas 215 miles north-west in Tonopah, it’s a gateway to the cosmos.
To my rookie brain, stargazing is much the same as my wing mirrors in my driving lessons: you can get by with just looking in vaguely the right direction and pretending to see.
It’s a checkpoint in Nevada’s map that boom-and-bust exploded in another life when Jim Butler threw a rock in frustration at his departing donkey (they’re called burros here) while desert camping in 1900, and then found out what he was actually yeeting at mules was extremely valuable silver ore that had revealed itself to him. But no quicker had the silver rush happened that the silver slump soon stunted all proceedings. Things dry up real fast in this landscape that was once substantially underwater.
Despite everything, there’s still silver shimmering up above.
Astronomer Russ Gartz is my dedicated guide at Tonopah’s Clair Blackburn Memorial Stargazing Park, in charge of opening my eyes to a celestial playground that I hadn’t yet unlocked.
I’m following in the footsteps of starry-eyed tourists, like a Berliner who travelled all the way to Tonopah just to look up.
Stargazing is an emerging travel trend and set to make rise a new breed of international back-to-basics camper who doesn’t necessarily ever fiddle about with a tent.
Tonopah’s draw is that it’s 6,000ft above sea level, so you’re physically closer to the stars or, as Russ calls it, ‘the cathedral of awe’.
The universal velvet blanket is a great equalizer across religions to Russ and tickles both his scientific and spiritual curiosities.
To my rookie brain, however, stargazing is much the same as my wing mirrors in my driving lessons: you can get by with just looking in vaguely the right direction and pretending to see.
Don’t expect to see much going in blind. Russ recommends buying a star atlas and hitting the books to learn. Once you see it, you see it. You just need to have some understanding of your starfield and then the rest is textbook relativeness and the template is set to pull out Orion’s Belt and Hercules’ Chest, etc, from the catalogue.
I’m meekly using Russ’s £3,000+ telescope that tracks the stars not visible to the naked eye, but a set of £100 night vision binoculars can serve you well for a lifetime. I see what I’m told to see like a child seeing the ocean for the first time.
Nature can be cruel in many ways and one of those is the unpredictability of cloud cover. A back-up plan is essential, which is why it’s important to fold in visits to the small towns off the lonesome highways to avoid getting ghosted by the galaxies.
Tonopah is home to an eye-opening mining tour, which tells of its gruesome mine shaft disasters, the Mizpah hotel, which is the #1 rated haunted hotel in America by US Today (‘We blame everything on the ghosts here’), and ‘America’s Scariest Motel’ specifically themed around menacing clowns and populated by over 2,000 dolls of them built upon the miners’ graveyard. There’s plenty of eye-shielding to be done in tandem with sky watching here. Scope for horror and horoscopes, such is the duality.
If we talk about Nevada, we have to talk about aliens.
Ever since rumours began of the goings on at government facility Area 51, aliens have become intertwined with Nevada’s DNA and there’s no better whistlestop tour than the Extraterrestrial Highway.
Restro-bar The Little A’le’inn can be found in Rachel, the smallest of small towns (population: est 54), and serves as a meeting point-melting pot for tourists and enthusiasts interested in sharing their personal experiences with the unexplainable in the middle of nowhere over a drink.
If aliens do indeed walk among us then they probably think Nevada’s coming on a bit strong with their state-wide shrine. Any tenuously linked alien-themed memorabilia that can be dreamt of, they sell it. I’m not quite sure how they’d feel about ‘fresh E.T. jerky’.
Whether it be looking to the skies for divine luck from the Las Vegas airport slot machines, looking to the skies for answers from Rachel’s Black Mailbox, or looking to the skies for clarity and scale from Tonopah or The Great Basin – the common thread is that people are all looking, searching here.
Your Daily Horoscope
Where the Silver State takes gold is that Nevada truly feels like the one special place on this planet where you can look at the sky and feel the sky look back.
Where to stay on your Nevada road trip and how to get there
I wouldn’t recommend driving into the desert in the dark so if you would like to factor in a Las Vegas stay before hitting the road, rooms at the city’s tallest hotel Fontainebleau (a staggering 67 floors) start from £237 per night, overlook the Sphere and offer a good exploring location as it’s situated at the top of the main strip on S Las Vegas Blvd.
From Vegas onwards:
Motel 6 (Beatty) – from £70 per night
Belvada (Tonopah) – from £140 per night
Shady Motel (Caliente) – from £75 per night
We made our own road trip route (map below) which combined Travel Nevada’s Free-Range Art Highway (this goes all the way up to Reno, we did about 2/3 of the route before heading east from Tonopah), Extraterrestrial Highway and Great Basin Highway (we did around half of this highway on the final journey back to Las Vegas) with Pink Jeep.
Virgin Atlantic fly daily to Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) from London Heathrow (LHR) from £590pp for a return trip in Economy class.
Alternatively, Virgin Atlantic fly to Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) from Manchester (MAN) on an extended summer schedule on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays between June 2, 2024-October 25, 2024 from £731pp for a return trip in Economy class.
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