The premise: to spend 2 days, 2 nights, and a few hours on either end getting to know Las Vegas without leaving the Strip. Pretty dumb premise, right?

The backstory is that a friend randomly called a few months back and asked if I wanted to hang out in Las Vegas on the cheap for a couple of days in March. James and I met on an epic backpacking trip a long time ago; he lives in Oklahoma and we don’t get to hang out too often; plus random trips are cool, so the answer was yes. And though Las Vegas is absolutely last on my list of places in the U.S. to pay to get on a plane and fly out to to spend time in, it’s interesting for all the reasons I’m not interested in going there. So on top of hanging out, I took on the project of trying to figure out Las Vegas, and what it’s like to live there. I scribbled down field notes in my journal, pored through publications, and talked up the locals, barely scratching the surface obviously. It was a lot of fun though, so I’m inspired to do it for every place I travel to from now on.

I did more writing than photographing on this trip. By design, Las Vegas is exhibitionist and camera-ready, and our wanderings mostly limited to the Strip – so it was a challenge for me to take photos that were fundamentally Las Vegas but which didn’t feel like tourism ads. The more I think about it, the more I’d love to go back to LV for a longer period of time to do just that. Funny how that works out.

These two images sum up the Las Vegas Strip for me.

Fundamentally, what Las Vegas offers its visitors:
The nothingness that is just one street off of the Strip behind the Wynn Hotel, like walking behind a movie set:

And then we’ve got: me and the Strip, a crazy sunset (real colors!) and the mountains I would have loved to explore, and late afternoon light on my friend James.