Black Rock Desert

The flattest, emptiest ground in North America made Nevada's Black Rock Desert the place where a car first broke the sound barrier. On October 15, 1997, British driver Andy Green piloted the jet-powered ThrustSSC across the playa at 763.035 mph (1,227.986 km/h), a world land speed record that still stands. The desert covers about 1,000 square miles (2,600 km²) in Humboldt, Pershing and Washoe counties, and its playa alone spans about 200 square miles (520 km²), a cracked alkali floor left by Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, which once covered it under roughly 500 feet (150 m) of water.

Most late summers since 1990, the Burning Man gathering builds a temporary city of tens of thousands on the playa and then removes it, leaving no trace. The desert also preserves history. The Applegate and Lassen emigrant trails crossed here in the 1840s and 1850s, and wagon ruts and diary inscriptions survive in the Black Rock Desert–High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area, created by Congress in 2000. The tiny town of Gerlach, at the desert's southwestern edge, is the gateway.

• Nevada
  The Silver State, the driest in the nation located in
• The Basin and Range
  The stretched crust of parallel desert ranges and valleys part of
• The Great Basin
  The vast interior where no rivers reach the sea part of
• Badwater Basin
  The lowest point in North America related