Rebecca Engel
The Strip is about four miles long, and it’s very good at what it does. It’s also the only part of the city most people ever see, which is how a place with a red rock canyon on one side and a 12,000 foot peak on the other ended up with a reputation for being one long casino floor.
So this list skips the tables completely. Fifteen things to do in Las Vegas that don’t involve a chip, a slot machine, or a sports book, and between them they cover the desert, the food, the history, and the odd corners the city keeps out past the freeway. Some are twenty minutes from your hotel. A couple are worth the hour drive.
1. Drive The Scenic Loop At Red Rock Canyon
Red Rock Canyon sits about twenty minutes west of the Strip, and the change is abrupt. One minute you’re passing outlet malls, and the next there’s a wall of red and cream sandstone a couple thousand feet high in the windshield.
The main event is a thirteen mile one way loop road with pullouts most of the way around. You can drive the whole thing in half an hour without ever getting out of the car, which plenty of people do, or you can stop at Calico Hills and scramble around on the rock for as long as your legs hold up.
Trails run off the loop at nearly every pullout. Calico Tanks is the one most people pick, a couple of miles round trip that finishes at a natural water pocket with the whole valley spread out behind it.
Timed entry reservations are required through the busy half of the year, so sort that out before you drive over. Early morning is cooler, quieter, and the light on the sandstone is better anyway.
2. Hike Out To The Fire Wave At Valley Of Fire
Valley of Fire is Nevada’s oldest state park and it’s about an hour northeast, which is far enough that most visitors never make it. The people who do tend to describe it as the best day they had.
The Fire Wave is the headline. It’s a short walk, roughly a mile and a half round trip, out to a slab of sandstone striped in cream, pink, and rust like someone poured it. Photos don’t really prepare you for the scale of it.
The trail closes through the hottest stretch of summer, and that closure is not a suggestion. There’s no shade out there and the rock radiates heat back at you all afternoon.
Give yourself the whole day if you can. Atlatl Rock has petroglyphs up a staircase, Elephant Rock is a two minute walk from the east entrance, and the road out to White Domes is worth driving on its own.
3. Walk The Boneyard At The Neon Museum
When a Las Vegas hotel gets torn down, its sign has to go somewhere. A lot of them ended up here, in an outdoor lot north of downtown that holds something like 250 of them.
They’re not restored and most aren’t lit. They’re propped up, leaned against each other, and rusting quietly in the sun, which is a much stranger and better experience than a tidy museum would be. Stardust, Moulin Rouge, the Sahara, a giant silver slipper.
The visitor center is the old La Concha Motel lobby, a swooping white shell of a building from 1961 that was moved here piece by piece.
Book ahead either way, but the evening slots are the ones that sell out first. A handful of the signs are relit after dark and the whole yard looks completely different.
4. Tour The Mob Museum In The Old Federal Courthouse
The building matters as much as the exhibits here. It’s the 1933 federal courthouse downtown, and the second floor courtroom is where one of the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime was actually held in 1950.
You sit in that courtroom and watch footage from the hearings that happened in it. Three floors cover the rest, from the crime families to the wiretaps to the law enforcement side, which gets more space than you’d expect.
The heaviest artifact is the brick wall from the St Valentine’s Day Massacre garage in Chicago, moved here and reassembled.
There’s a working speakeasy in the basement with a distillery attached. It’s a bit of a gimmick and it’s also a genuinely nice bar, so make of that what you will.
5. Step Inside The Atomic Museum
For about forty years, the government detonated nuclear devices roughly sixty five miles from downtown. Vegas turned it into a tourist draw. Hotels advertised the blast times, mixed atomic cocktails, and sold rooms facing north.
This museum, a Smithsonian affiliate over near the university, tells that whole story without flinching much. Somewhere around 900 tests happened at the Nevada Test Site, and the exhibits run from the science to the fallout to the people who worked out there.
The Ground Zero Theater seats you in a replica observation bunker and runs a test detonation at you, complete with a blast of air and a rumble through the bench.
It’s the most sobering hour on this list, and it’s also the one that explains more about southern Nevada than anything else you can do here.
6. Play A Few Rounds At The Pinball Hall Of Fame
This is a warehouse near the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard filled with hundreds of pinball and arcade machines, and nearly all of them work. The oldest go back to the 1950s.
It costs whatever you feed the machines, which is usually a quarter or two per game. There’s no admission, no drinks service, and no attempt whatsoever at atmosphere. Fluorescent lights, concrete floor, rows of machines.
It’s a nonprofit, and the money left over after the rent gets donated. That’s the whole business model.
Bring quarters, or use the change machines by the door before somebody else empties them. An hour here costs less than one round at a hotel bar.
7. Get Lost In Omega Mart At Area15
Area15 is an entertainment complex just off the freeway west of the Strip, and the reason to go is Omega Mart, which is easier to describe badly than well.
It looks like a supermarket. The shelves are stocked, the lighting is right, the products have labels and prices. Then you notice the products are absurd, and then you find that some of the coolers and doorways aren’t coolers and doorways at all, and open into something else entirely.
That something else is a couple of floors of surreal rooms built by the art collective Meow Wolf, tied together by a story you can follow closely or ignore completely.
Give it two hours minimum. People who budget forty five minutes come out annoyed at themselves.
8. Stand Under Seven Magic Mountains
Ten miles south of the city, out where there is genuinely nothing, somebody stacked boulders into seven towers about thirty feet tall and painted them in fluorescent pink, yellow, and green.
It’s a real artwork by the artist Ugo Rondinone, installed in 2016, and it’s free to walk up to. Dawn to dusk, a small dirt parking area, and desert in every direction.
It was meant to come down after two years and keeps getting extended, so check that it’s still standing before you build a morning around it.
Ten minutes is enough. It’s a stop on the way to or from somewhere rather than a destination, and it photographs better in the low light at either end of the day.
9. Catch First Friday In The Arts District
The Arts District runs along Main Street south of downtown, and locals call it 18b. Antique shops, galleries, tattoo studios, coffee roasters, and about a dozen breweries and taprooms within walking distance of each other.
On the first Friday of the month the whole neighbourhood turns into a street festival. Roads close, vendors set up, bands play, and several thousand people turn out. It’s free to walk into.
Any other evening it’s quieter and honestly easier to enjoy. The murals are up permanently and the bars aren’t three deep.
This is the closest thing the city has to a normal night out in a normal neighbourhood, which after two days on the Strip is a genuine relief.
10. Eat Your Way Down Spring Mountain Road
Chinatown here isn’t a few blocks downtown. It starts about a mile west of the Strip and runs for several miles along Spring Mountain Road, and it’s one of the best eating streets in the country.
It’s also not only Chinese. Korean barbecue, Japanese izakayas, Taiwanese bakeries, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino, and a huge amount of ramen, spread across strip mall after strip mall.
The strip mall part throws people off. Some of the best food in Las Vegas is in a unit between a nail salon and a phone repair shop, and that’s just how the city is built.
It runs late, which is the other reason to know about it. Plenty of places serve past midnight, and a few go until dawn.
11. Take The Dam Tour At Hoover Dam
Hoover Dam is about thirty miles southeast and it’s still hard to believe in person. It’s 726 feet from the base to the crest, it was finished in 1935, and it was built by hand in the middle of a depression in a canyon that regularly hit 120 degrees.
There are two tours. The shorter one takes you down to the generator room, and the longer one goes further into the tunnels inside the dam wall itself, through passages cut into the rock.
The longer tour has limits on numbers and can’t always be booked in advance, so get there earlier than you think you need to.
Even without a ticket it’s worth the drive. Walk out on the pedestrian path across the bypass bridge for the view down the dam face that ends up on every postcard.
12. Paddle To Emerald Cave On The Colorado River
Below the dam the Colorado runs through Black Canyon, and the water is a deep cold green that looks nothing like anything else within a hundred miles.
Emerald Cave is a shallow alcove in the canyon wall about a mile upstream from Willow Beach. When the sun hits the water at the right angle it bounces up into the cave and the whole thing glows.
Guided kayak trips run from Willow Beach most of the year and take around three hours. Late morning is when the light does its thing, so the early trips are the ones to book.
The canyon has hot springs further up as well, though those take a longer day and some scrambling to reach.
13. Cool Off On Mount Charleston
Forty five minutes northwest of the Strip there’s a peak that tops out at 11,916 feet, and the temperature up there runs twenty to thirty degrees below the valley floor.
In July that difference is the entire point. You leave a hotel in 108 degree heat and half an hour later you’re walking under ponderosa pines in a fleece.
Mary Jane Falls is the classic hike, steep but short, up to a rock face with water coming down it in spring. Cathedral Rock is the other one everyone does.
In winter it does the opposite job. There’s real snow, a small ski area up Lee Canyon, and a lot of people from the valley driving up just to stand in it.
14. Wander The Trails At Springs Preserve
Las Vegas exists because of springs, and this is where they were. 180 acres a few minutes from downtown, built on the water source that made a settlement possible out here in the first place.
It’s gardens, trails through the mesquite, an interpretive museum, and a good chunk of desert left as desert. The Nevada State Museum sits on the same site if you want the longer history.
Boomtown 1905 is a walk through reconstruction of the town as it was the year the railroad arrived, which is a useful thing to see before you judge the modern version too harshly.
Go in the morning. Much of it is outdoors and the shade runs out by early afternoon.
15. Taste Your Way Through Ethel M And Its Cactus Garden
Out in Henderson, about twenty minutes southeast, there’s a chocolate factory you can walk through for free. Windows onto the production floor, a sample at the end, and a shop.
The better half is behind it. The botanical cactus garden covers a few acres and holds something like 300 species of cactus and succulent, laid out along paths with the names on little markers.
It’s free, it’s usually quiet, and it takes about half an hour. For a lot of visitors it’s the first time they’ve looked at desert plants properly rather than through a car window.
In winter the whole garden gets strung with lights, which is when the crowds finally show up.
A Few More Things To Do In Las Vegas Without The Casino Floor
Downtown Container Park is built out of shipping containers around a playground, with a forty foot praying mantis at the entrance that shoots fire on the hour after dark. It’s free to walk into and the food is decent.
The Writer’s Block is an independent bookstore downtown with an indoor artificial bird sanctuary in it, which is a sentence that sounds made up and isn’t.
The Punk Rock Museum opened downtown a few years back and is staffed by people who were actually in the bands. Tours are sometimes led by a musician you’ve heard of.
And if all you want is grass and shade, Sunset Park has both, plus a lake with ducks on it. Lake Mead is thirty minutes out for swimming and boats when the water level cooperates.
Final Thoughts
The best things to do in Las Vegas mostly aren’t in the casinos, and that stops being a surprising thing to say after about a day here.
The city sits in the middle of some of the strangest landscape in the country, it feeds several hundred thousand people who work nights, and it’s been quietly collecting the leftovers of its own history in lots and warehouses for decades. All of that is out there, and almost none of it costs much.
Rent a car if you can. Nearly everything on this list is a twenty minute to one hour drive, and a car is what turns a Strip trip into a look at the actual place.
