One of the largest Buddhist stupas in North America is built of concrete designed to last 1,000 years.

A collection of fading fantasy tchotchkes lines this dirt road in the Colorado wilderness.

Home to a timed geyser created by complete accident.

A museum dedicated to the history and art of staying clean.

The largest island on the great salt lake is home to curious creatures and strange stories.

Dozens of rockets and missiles are on display outside a testing facility in the Utah desert.

An earthwork sculpture built by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake only reemerges during drought.

This now-abandoned part of the original transcontinental railroad route provides a surreal driving and historical experience.

Almost all that remains of a town dedicated to supporting the First Transcontinental Railroad.

This plaque marks the site where the penultimate chapter in the journey of two doomed boys unfolded in an imagined parallel universe.

A proto micro-nation sometimes populated by artists, surrounded on all sides by a Utah most barren.

In this roadside "community for the small," abandoned toys gain new lives.

Experience a quartz crystal sound bath inside a storied, all-wood sound-chamber.

A desert ghost town—occupied for only 12 years—was once home to more than 500 silver mines.

The "Fun Spot of the Desert" is now a haunting ruin, and a reminder that putting a water park in a desert is a bad idea.

No one's quite sure why there's a metal megaphone bolted on two rocks in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

In the middle of the desert, miles from any human life, sat an anomalous pay phone that still magically answers your calls.

Brightly colored 30-foot-tall totems light up the desert sky just outside Las Vegas.

The wild west is still alive and well at this authentic mining town watering hole.

Dyed by iron oxide over centuries, these sandstone rocks rise thousands of feet into the sky.

A memorial to the unknown and unheralded men and women of the Cold War military and intelligence services.

An errant donkey ushered in a new era of mining in Nevada.

This naturally heated mountainous creek has created a group of neon blue pools of potentially deadly boiling water.

Eons old volcanic activity created one of the most stunning rock formations in the United States.