Spend more than a day or two in Las Vegas and you'll soon find yourself gasping for a blast of sunlight and fresh air away from the casinos. A glance at the horizon makes it clear that you'll have to cross an expanse of empty desert before you reach anywhere interesting, but exhilarating day-trip destinations do exist.

Perhaps the most obvious targets lie in the eye-catching Spring Mountains to the west. At their base, monumental walls cradle the desert fastness of Red Rock Canyon, while further north wooded slopes rise toward the summit of Mount Charleston . If Red Rock Canyon whets your appetite for otherworldly desolation, you'll also enjoy the longer excursion to the incandescent moonscape of the Valley of Fire, northeast of the city. Finally, neither Hoover Dam nor Lake Mead counts as a natural wonder, but each is in its own way every bit as breathtaking.

This section only includes places that can be reached and explored in a day's round-trip excursion from Las Vegas. Although many tourists take the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon while they're here, getting to the national park involves a 600-mile round-trip drive, so we've only covered organized flight or bus tours that can get you there and back in a day. Similarly, we haven't included the awe-inspiring national parks of southern Utah, such as Zion, which is 160 miles distant, and Bryce Canyon, eighty miles beyond that.

All these parks are covered extensively in our Southwest USA guide. On the basis that Las Vegas holds enough casinos to last any sane human being a lifetime, neither does this guide include the nearby state-line gambling resorts of Primm, Mesquite, or Laughlin.