Another side trip: an 80-mile out-and-back to Great Basin National Park, southeast of Ely. "It's the least-visited national park in the country," says the ranger at the visitors center. "It's not on the way to anywhere else, so you have to really want to come here." Or need one last stamp in your National Park Passport.

When we tell her that we're headed for Lost Wages, she carefully outlines on a map the locations of all the known speed traps en route. She will turn out to be as spot-on as a police scanner.

I'd naively thought we'd see some enormous sinkhole of a "great basin," but it turns out you'd have to be in the space shuttle to do that, since the true Great Basin stretches from mid-Utah to the Mojave Desert. The park is really a preserve, not a specific scenic attraction. It's a winding alpine road to an overlook 3,000 feet below the summit of 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak and a variety of trails for serious hikers (including one to Wheeler's summit), but Great Basin's sole EZ-on/EZ-off attraction is the dramatic quarter-mile-long limestone cavern called Lehman Caves, just inside the entrance. The caves were "discovered" in 1885 by a local named Lehman—Native Americans had visited them for centuries, but of course nothing is ever real until a white man finds and names it—and they became enough of a tourist attraction that in the early 1920s, the then owners of the caves built what may be the world's first motel unit: a log hut, still standing near the caves.

U.S. 93, the road to Vegas, is so punishingly straight, long (230-plus miles with few bends), and empty that at one point we begin to sing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." For the first 90 miles, the only sign of life is a single cowboy with a small herd of cattle. A real cowboy, doing real cowboy work and wearing, yes, a real cowboy hat. Still, it's a sight worth three hours of monotony.

John McPhee wrote a wonderful book, Basin and Range, about this very country, and McPhee managed to make geology fascinating. Unlike every other major watercourse in the country, the water that flows into the Great Basin and the surrounding area from ranges can find no outlet to the sea but instead trickles down into the mountain-rimmed bowl, where it either evaporates, sinks into the ground, or becomes so mineral-rich that it forms the Great Salt Lake. The evaporation is what also creates the area's salt flats and hard-packed dry lakes. Racers use the salt at Bonneville, Utah, to set land-speed records. Ad agencies shoot car commercials on whatever basin flat will let them stir up the most dust. NASA pilots use the runway-to-infinity dry lake at Edwards Air Force Base, near Mojave, to land the space shuttle and every experimental military aircraft they can get their hands on.

Halfway to Vegas, we stop at Cathedral Gorge State Park, a small wonder of siltstone cliffs that look like those wet-sand sculptures children dribble through their palms at the beach. It's an immensely fragile site that changes every time it rains, and anywhere but in the back of beyond it'd be destroyed by morons intent on carving their initials into everything in sight.