The Southwest's Plus-Size Cousin is Worth Its Weight in Buried Silver

If you've spent any time in the American Southwest, Nevada is full of disappointment. It in no way compares to the glorious colour fest of the Four Corners states. There are smatterings of red rock, but for such a huge state, they are more like bitty flourishes than real situations.

In Utah, the colors take you away - literally to another world, where you can imagine Earth is some long forgotten byway in the human evolutionary story. In New Mexico, there's an indescribable magic and mystique, and in Arizona, well, there's the Grand Fucking Canyon and miles of crispy grasslands that run interference for it, so you wouldn't guess such a marvel is sitting right beneath your feet. Even Colorado, best know for its mountains has an ethereal quality to its deserts, possibly because you know they're just the joinery between the awesome cragscapes that define the state in the common imagination.

But Nevada is, well, plain. Its main feature is its vastness, its endless stretches of hardness, rock, and desolation. They are proud features, no doubt, but they're tiresome to pass through. The endless dryness, unpunctuated by spectacle or wondrous glamour of any kind- it's just rock after rock with even rockier mountains dividing the vast sprawls of gravel. It's as if the Inland Empire's zoning was modeled on the Mojave, with great malls serving as loci for the vast, unremarkable expanse. It's a hard sell, to be sure.

But due to its wide and expansive distances and the clarity of the air here, the sunsets all over the state are amongst the most satisfying of any I've seen. First of all, they last forever. And it's as if the somberness of the Silver State merely waits for nightfall to light it all up like a bonfire. There are colors and majesty hidden in those rocks that it takes a special angle of light to realize. Like invisible ink or the onset of a psychedelic trip, the mountains come alive just in those moment before everything goes dark. And the waves of light spread deep into the distances and the far off ranges, and the mountains smile at you as if they are happy that you have stayed to share in their glorious secret.

When you drive East, fleeing the California sun, the effect can be incredible. Whether along 80, 50, 15 or one of the byways, the landscape's unremarkability relents for those delightful hanging moments before the last rays of the western collapse sting the sky and vanish into the nuclear blue glow of day's end. And for those moments, you are glad you took the time - were forced by topography to take the time - to re-appreciate, to reimagine what you once believed was mean rubble and nothing else.

So Nevada has its surprises. But like a flower blooming or a woman's eyes lighting up in the presence of a special someone, you have to catch it at the right moment, and you have to spend the attention to notice it. It won't come get you if you are distracted. And it won't beat you over the head with Vegas marquee signs saying, "Beauty 35 feet to the left, no entrance fees, $5.95 buffet!"

It's in the quiet of forever that you experience Nevada at its simple, occultly magical best. And I'm glad to have peered through the passes to see its dazzling layers waking up just before bedtime tonight on this long drive back to LA.