After three years of living in Las Vegas, Pat and I finally took a weekend road trip up to Great Basin National Park. We drove up to Ely (ee-lee) on a Friday night after work, so we drove straight through and didn’t stop for any sightseeing. We spent Saturday exploring Great Basin, and then stopped at a few roadside attractions on our way back to Vegas on Sunday.

These tips can easily be reversed for a Las Vegas to Great Basin National Park road trip. To read about what exactly we did in Great Basin, check out this post.

We started the day at a motel in Ely. We got breakfast at the Flower Basket Espresso Depot and checked out the Garnet Mercantile. If you have more time, be sure to visit Renaissance Village and keep an eye out for some of Ely’s murals.

As you leave Ely, take a brief detour to the Ward Charcoal Ovens state historical park.

There are seven state parks between Ely and Las Vegas: Cave Lake, Spring Valley, Echo Canyon, Cathedral Gorge, Beaver Dam, Kershaw-Ryan, and Valley of Fire. Although we’ve visited some of the others in the past, we just stopped at Cathedral Gorge on this trip. Check out the links for my full write-ups of each visit!

As you continue on towards Vegas, check out the hot springs and ghost towns in Caliente. While we didn’t visit the hot springs at the hotel this time, it is definitely something we would like to do in the future. We grabbed a snack at J&J’s Fast Food–the taco was simple but hit the spot.

If you haven’t been to Valley of Fire State Park or the Lake Mead National Recreation Area yet, you’ll be passing right by on your way back into town. We visit both of these locations on day trips from Vegas, so we skipped them this time around.

If you’re just visiting Las Vegas, check out my list of posts about the city!