11 Things Nevadans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Nevada is the state that contains Las Vegas, which means the rest of America thinks it knows Nevada — the neon, the casinos, the buffets, the 3am decisions that seemed reasonable at the time — and has never been more wrong about a place in its life. The Silver State is 110,000 square miles of high desert, ancient mountains, ghost towns, and Basin and Range geology so stark and so beautiful it looks like another planet, populated by people who have developed in response to their particular landscape and history a set of habits that the rest of the country finds somewhere between libertarian and lawless and has never quite known how to categorize. What happens here stays here. Mostly because nobody on the outside would believe it anyway.

1. Drive three hours through empty desert to reach civilization and call it a quick run

Nevada is the seventh largest state and one of the least densely populated, and outside the Las Vegas and Reno metro areas, distances between towns can be measured in hours across terrain that is spectacular and empty and unforgiving in equal measure. US-93 through eastern Nevada — the loneliest road in America’s loneliest state — passes through towns so small they are more accurately described as intentions than communities. Nevadans in rural areas plan their supply runs with military logistics, buy in quantities that would suggest they’re preparing for something, and return home across two hundred miles of desert without finding this remarkable.

2. Visit Las Vegas casinos with the detached efficiency of people running errands

Locals in Las Vegas do not experience the Strip the way visitors do. There is no sense of occasion, no deliberate outfit, no careful decision about which buffet to try first. Las Vegas locals go to casinos the way other people go to the grocery store — on the way home, briefly, with a parking spot they know about, using a player’s card that gets them discounts, and leaving within an hour with the matter-of-fact efficiency of people who have demystified the whole operation through sheer proximity. The tourist gawking at the Bellagio fountains is experiencing something real. The local driving past them for the four hundredth time is thinking about what to make for dinner.

3. Explain that Nevada is not all desert while living almost entirely in the desert

Nevada is actually mountainous — it has more mountain ranges than any other state in the contiguous US, 314 of them — and Nevadans will point this out when the desert assumption becomes too much to bear. The Ruby Mountains in northeastern Nevada look like the Alps and are almost entirely unknown. The Spring Mountains above Las Vegas have ski resorts. The Sierra Nevada border the west. And yet Nevada is also 85% desert, and most Nevadans live in the desert portions, and the correction is technically accurate while also being something of a rhetorical strategy.

4. Gamble with the casual frequency that other people check social media

For Nevada residents, the slot machine is not a special occasion. It is ambient. Gas stations have slot machines. Grocery stores have slot machines. Laundromats have slot machines. Airports have slot machines before the security line and after the security line and at the gate. Nevadans feed machines, collect winnings or absorb losses, and continue about their business with the emotional flatness of people for whom this has become so routine it barely registers as an activity. The rest of America sets foot in a casino and feels the electricity of something illicit. Nevada residents feel nothing in particular. That’s how you know they’ve been here long enough.

5. Refer to Area 51 with a knowing fatigue that comes from decades of being asked about it

Area 51 — the classified US Air Force facility in the Nevada desert, the subject of more alien conspiracy theories than any other location on Earth — is in Nevada, and Nevadans who live anywhere near the Great Basin have spent their entire lives being asked about it with a combination of conspiracy enthusiasm and sincere curiosity that they have fully exhausted the energy to engage with. Yes, it exists. Yes, it’s classified. No, they don’t know what’s in there. Yes, the 2019 “Storm Area 51” event was something that actually happened and they have complicated feelings about it. Can we talk about the Ruby Mountains now.

6. Own a mining claim in the desert and go out on weekends to look for gold, seriously

Nevada was built on silver and gold, and the mining tradition runs so deep in the state’s identity that recreational gold prospecting — staking a small claim in the desert, running a highbanker or dry washer, spending weekends looking for color in dry washes and hillside outcroppings — is a genuine hobby practiced by a significant number of Nevada residents with equipment, expertise, and genuine finds to show for it. The ghost towns scattered across the state are not just history. They are evidence of what the desert contains, and Nevadans have not stopped looking.

7. Navigate by casino names rather than street addresses in Las Vegas

Giving directions in Las Vegas — at least on and near the Strip — involves casino landmarks rather than street addresses, because the casinos are permanent, visible, and universally known while street addresses require more cognitive overhead than the situation demands. “Turn left at the Bellagio.” “It’s across from the Wynn.” “Go past the MGM until you see the Luxor pyramid.” Locals navigate this way automatically and give these directions to visitors who find them more useful than anything a GPS provides, because the casinos are visible from a mile away and the street signs are often not.

8. Attend the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas and experience zero cognitive dissonance

The National Finals Rodeo — the Super Bowl of professional rodeo, ten nights of the world’s best cowboys and cowgirls competing in Las Vegas every December — is one of the largest sporting events in Nevada and one of the most authentically Western things that happens in a city that is famous for being artificial. Las Vegas transforms in December: the Strip fills with cowboy hats and boot cut jeans, every country artist of significance plays a residency, and the Thomas and Mack Center roars with the specific energy of people who came here from every Western state to watch the best in the world do something real. Nevadans find this perfectly natural. The juxtaposition is the point.

9. Discuss water rights with the grim specificity of people who understand it as a survival issue

Nevada is the driest state in the country — average annual precipitation of about 9 inches — and the management of water, the legal framework of water rights, the politics of Colorado River allocation, and the future of the Ogallala Aquifer are not abstract policy issues to Nevadans. They are the central organizing anxiety of life in a desert state that is simultaneously growing faster than almost anywhere in America and watching its primary water sources contract under the pressure of drought and population. Las Vegas has cut its water consumption dramatically through mandatory conservation while continuing to grow. Nevadans who understand the full picture are not reassured by this. They are doing the math.

10. Drive out to the Black Rock Desert and experience the scale as a physical sensation

The Black Rock Desert — the vast alkali playa in northwestern Nevada where Burning Man happens, where land speed records are set, where the horizon is so far away it curves with the Earth — is one of the most spatially extreme environments in North America, a flat expanse so large and so empty that your sense of scale simply breaks down and has to be rebuilt from scratch. Nevadans who go out there for the first time experience something that residents of denser, more visually complex landscapes never encounter: the sensation of being genuinely, measurably small against the Earth. Some people find this disturbing. Nevadans tend to find it clarifying.

11. Accept that their neighbor might be doing something completely legal that would be illegal everywhere else

Nevada’s libertarian streak — the legal prostitution in most counties, the gambling, the historically loose regulatory environment, the general attitude that what adults do with their time and money is their own business — produces a residential culture of genuine live-and-let-live that extends to the neighbor’s activities, the parking lot next door, and the general question of what people are up to and whether it’s anyone else’s concern. The answer in Nevada is usually no. The specifics of what the neighbor is legally doing vary. Nevada has decided this is fine, and the decision has been remarkably stable.

Nevada doesn’t need the rest of America to understand it — it barely needs the rest of America to visit, though the rest of America visits in enormous numbers and Nevada accommodates them with the practiced efficiency of a state that has been in the hospitality business since statehood. Behind the neon and the slots and the carefully managed unreality of Las Vegas is a state of genuine, specific, sometimes harsh beauty — ghost towns that tell the full story of boom and bust, mountain ranges that nobody has named a lifestyle brand after, desert playas so flat and so quiet that sound itself seems to thin out and disappear. The people who actually live here, who drive the empty highways and work the ranches and prospect the dry washes and watch the water table with a careful, anxious attention — those people know something about Nevada that the Strip was never designed to show you. It takes a little more desert than most people budget for. It is worth every mile.