Tonopah, NV
In the high desert of central Nevada, on the historic Tonopah Highway between Reno and Las Vegas. Two runways (15/33 at 7,300ft, 11/29 at 6,002ft), uncontrolled, field elevation 5,427ft. The civilian field — not to be confused with Tonopah Test Range Airport 30 miles east, the secret facility where the F-117 Nighthawk was developed and operated by the Air Force from 1981 until its public reveal in 1988. The Test Range remains restricted. Tonopah itself was the largest silver-mining boomtown in Nevada from 1900 to 1920; the Mizpah Hotel in town, built in 1907, is reputedly the most haunted hotel in the West. Wyatt Earp briefly owned a saloon here in 1902.
KTPH is your jumping-off point for one of the emptiest roads in the country. In 1996 Nevada named State Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway, leaning into the Area 51 lore, since Groom Lake sits just over the ridge to the south. The road runs nearly a hundred lonely miles of high-desert sagebrush, and its one settlement is Rachel: a few dozen people and the Little A'Le'Inn, a bar-motel that's fed alien hunters and road-trippers for decades. It's genuine Great Basin emptiness, vast valleys and distant ranges and some of the darkest night skies anywhere.
Mono Lake is at least 760,000 years old, three times saltier than the Pacific, and dotted with bizarre tufa towers — calcium carbonate spires that grew underwater from spring-fed mineral interactions and were exposed when LA diverted the lake's tributaries. Above the lake at 8,400 feet, Bodie State Historic Park preserves California's most authentic Gold Rush ghost town in "arrested decay" — wallpaper still on the walls, dishes still on the tables, exactly as the last residents left when the town died in the 1940s. Both visible from KBIH-area flights. Eastern Sierra magic.
A square mile of dust and sagebrush at the foot of the eastern Sierra escarpment — the best-preserved of the ten American concentration camps that imprisoned more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, between 1942 and 1945. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 two months after Pearl Harbor. The first detainees arrived at Manzanar in March 1942; at peak, 10,046 people lived inside its barbed-wire perimeter under armed guard from eight watchtowers. The site sits in Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo Mountains — a high-desert basin where summer temperatures top 100°F, winter winds whip dust through the barracks, and Mount Whitney looms 14,505 feet over the western horizon. After the camp closed in November 1945, the Army auctioned off the wooden barracks and the place reverted to scrub. Most of what's there now is reconstructed: two barracks, a mess hall, a guard tower, and a stone sentry post. The cemetery monument — a white obelisk built by internees in 1943, inscribed "Soul Consoling Tower" in Japanese — is original. Manzanar became a National Historic Site in 1992. Annual pilgrimage every April.
Sixty feet of hexagonal basalt columns standing like a wall of stone pipes in the Reds Meadow Valley, just west of Mammoth Mountain. The formation is about 100,000 years old — molten basalt that pooled in a glacial valley and cooled slowly enough that contraction cracks split it into near-perfect six-sided columns. Glaciers later scraped one side flat, exposing the cross-section. The top of the formation is paved with the polished hexagonal tile-tops of the columns, a natural mosaic floor. National Monument since 1911 — Theodore Roosevelt protected it from a proposed hydroelectric dam that would have blown the columns up to make a reservoir. Sister formation to Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and Devils Tower in Wyoming, though far younger than either. Trailhead is at Reds Meadow, accessed by shuttle from Mammoth Mountain in summer; closed by snow most of the rest of the year. A short hike beyond the postpile reaches Rainbow Falls, a 101-foot drop on the Middle Fork San Joaquin River that catches morning rainbows reliably enough to name itself.