Las Vegas: the outdoor version

Yes, Las Vegas. Step one mile off the Strip's axis and you're in some of the most dramatic desert in North America: rust red sandstone canyons, petroglyph valleys, and Mojave big sky. We treat Vegas the way road trippers always have: as the world's most improbable basecamp, where the morning hike is world class and the evening entertainment is, well, Las Vegas.

Red Rock Canyon: the reason to come

Twenty minutes west of the Strip, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area throws up a 3,000 foot wall of banded sandstone that makes the casinos look temporary. The 13 mile scenic drive (one way loop) strings together the highlights; the essential stops are Calico Hills (scramble into the red rock as far as your nerve allows) and the Calico Tanks Trail (2.2 miles to a hidden water pocket and a summit view back across the whole valley, Strip included: the definitive Vegas photo nobody expects). Book the timed entry online in advance Oct-May; mornings beat both heat and crowds.

A few practical things the park website buries. The scenic drive is one way, so a stop you drive past is a stop you don't get back without looping the whole thirteen miles again; decide before the gate which pullouts matter. Calico Tanks is the one trail we'd defend as unmissable, but it is a scramble rather than a stroll, with a stretch of slickrock where the route is marked by cairns and your own judgement. The payoff is a notch in the rock that frames the Strip, ten miles east and looking entirely absurd from a desert summit.

Timed entry applies October through May and sells out on weekends, usually several days ahead. There is no walk up option in season, and the gate staff will turn you around; this is the single most common way people lose a Vegas morning. Book it the moment you know your dates. Outside those months there is no reservation because nobody sane is hiking Nevada sandstone in July.

Valley of Fire: the masterpiece an hour out

Nevada's oldest state park is, mile for mile, one of the most spectacular places in the Southwest: wind carved waves of crimson sandstone, 2,000 year old petroglyphs, and formations with names that undersell them. The must dos: Fire Wave (1.5 miles to a striped rock swirl that looks airbrushed), White Domes loop (slot canyon included), and the drive along Mouse's Tank Road, arguably the best short scenic road anywhere in the desert. An easy half or full day from the city; go at sunrise or late afternoon when the rock ignites.

Two things make Valley of Fire worth the extra hour over Red Rock. The first is Mouse's Tank Road, two and a half miles of pavement through a corridor of red rock that is, by a wide margin, the most beautiful short drive in southern Nevada; go slowly and stop often, because every bend reframes it. The second is the petroglyphs, several thousand years old and close enough to read at Atlatl Rock, up a steep metal staircase most visitors skip.

Fire Wave is the headline and deserves it, but know that the trailhead parking is small and the trail is fully exposed. It closes in the hot months for exactly that reason. White Domes is the better loop if you want variety in one walk: a slot canyon, a film set ruin, and sandstone in half a dozen colours inside about a mile.

Fitting both parks into one trip

They sit on opposite sides of the city, which trips people up. Red Rock is twenty minutes west; Valley of Fire is roughly an hour northeast. Doing both in a single day means crossing Las Vegas twice and rushing both, so we would not.

The arrangement that works: Red Rock on the morning you arrive, because it is close enough to manage on travel day fatigue, and Valley of Fire as a full day of its own, leaving the city by seven and getting back for a late dinner. If you only have one, take Valley of Fire for the scenery and Red Rock for the convenience. If you have a third morning, Red Rock a second time, earlier, with the drive done backwards in your head so you know which pullouts to claim.

The Strip, done as a hike

Treat the Strip itself as what it honestly is: a 4 mile urban trail with the strangest scenery in America. Walk it end to end at night, Mandalay Bay to the Stratosphere, past the Bellagio fountains (free show every 15-30 minutes), the Venetian's canals, and a billion LEDs. It's people watching as sport, costs nothing, and logs ten thousand steps before you notice.

Two warnings from walking it. The distances lie: the resorts are so large that what looks like one block is often a twenty minute walk, and the pavement runs you up and over pedestrian bridges rather than across the road. Budget double what the map suggests. And the casinos are deliberately built to absorb you, so a shortcut through a property usually costs more time than staying outside on the sidewalk, however hot it is.

Duck into the Bellagio lobby en route for the glass flower ceiling, two thousand hand blown blossoms installed overhead in 1998, free to stand under for as long as you like.

The free indoor stops worth planning around

This is the part of Vegas we'd actually recommend to someone who doesn't gamble, doesn't drink and doesn't want a show. The resorts compete on spectacle in their public spaces, and none of it costs anything to walk through. On a 110 degree afternoon, or any afternoon between a dawn hike and dinner, it is genuinely the best option in the city.

The Forum Shops at Caesars are the strangest of them: a Roman street under a painted sky that cycles from dawn to dusk and back every hour or so, complete with columns, fountains and marble statuary. It should be unbearable and somehow isn't. Go when it opens and you get the whole colonnade nearly to yourself, which is the only way the illusion really works.

Elsewhere there are painted domes worth craning your neck at, atrium light installations that hang several storeys through the middle of a building, and at least one aquarium you can walk past without paying. None of it is nature. All of it is free, air conditioned, and far more interesting than the slot floor you walk through to reach it.

Outside, between the properties, there is more public sculpture than the Strip's reputation suggests, including pieces you walk straight past on the way to somewhere louder.

Downtown, the Fremont Street Experience is the older, louder, stranger cousin: a five block LED canopy running light shows overhead while the vintage casinos glow below. Twenty minutes from the Strip and worth the detour for the contrast alone. Do the outdoor parks in the morning, the neon canyon after dark; that's the complete Vegas day.

The canopy runs a show roughly every hour after dark, and the whole five block street goes dark underneath while it plays. Stand in the middle rather than the edges; the screen curves overhead and the effect only works from directly beneath it. Between shows the vintage neon on the older casinos is the real attraction, and it photographs far better than anything on the Strip.

Honestly, we preferred it to the Strip. It is shorter, louder, cheaper and much less polished, and the crowd is there for the street rather than for a resort. Twenty minutes by car from the middle of the Strip, and the contrast between the two is the most interesting thing about a Vegas evening.

What we would skip

Honesty corner, as everywhere on this site. The Strip in daylight is grim: hot, charmless, and all the lighting that justifies the architecture is switched off. Do the desert in the morning and save the boulevard for dark. Paid observation decks are hard to justify when Calico Tanks gives you the same skyline for the cost of a park entry and some effort. And the midday summer months are not a shoulder season to work around, they are a reason to book a different month entirely; nothing outdoors is available to you between May and September except at dawn.

The pairing play: Death Valley and beyond

Vegas is the natural gateway for a desert loop: Death Valley is two hours northwest (our full guide covers the winter season strategy), Valley of Fire anchors the northeast, and the Mojave stretches toward Joshua Tree to the southwest. Three parks, one improbable basecamp with cheap flights and infinite restaurants. It's the most efficient desert trip in the West, and December through March it's perfect.

More from this trip

A confession about the pictures on this page: we have photographed the neon half of Las Vegas far more thoroughly than the dawn half. The desert sections above come from the same trips, but the camera came out after dark. Red Rock and Valley of Fire deserve their own gallery and will get one.

Before you go

Plan your day

Tell the planner where you're starting from and when, and it builds a timed itinerary from this guide's stops.