National Atomic Testing Museum

Our last stop, on your right: the National Atomic Testing Museum. Park here if you have an hour — but even from the car, this is where the strangest chapter of the valley lives.

About sixty-five miles northwest of where you're sitting, the United States spent forty years testing nuclear weapons. Around a hundred of those blasts, in the 1950s, went off in the open air — and Las Vegas, being Las Vegas, sold tickets. The mushroom clouds were visible from downtown rooftops. The Chamber of Commerce printed the test schedule like a show calendar. There were dawn "bomb parties," an atomic cocktail, and in 1957, a showgirl crowned Miss Atomic Bomb. For a few years this really was branded "the Atomic City."

There is a harder truth underneath the kitsch, and it deserves one plain sentence. The fallout drifted over communities in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, cancer rates rose among the people downwind, and the government has since acknowledged that harm and compensated those it calls the downwinders.

That's our tour — the valley the Strip forgot, from its first spring to its last secret. On your screen there's one more idea for the road, out past the edge of town. Thank you for riding along.