About Nevada

Nevada defies easy categorization. It is the seventh-largest state by area but ranks only 32nd in population, most of its 110,000 square miles of basin and range landscape is virtually empty, over 85% of it owned by the federal government. Its largest city, Las Vegas, receives more visitors annually than any other American destination and has built a concentration of resort, entertainment, and hospitality infrastructure unmatched anywhere on Earth. Its rural counties contain the Carlin Trend gold deposits , the world's second-largest, and some of the most dramatically beautiful and genuinely remote landscapes in North America.

The name 'Nevada' comes from the Spanish for 'snow-covered' , a reference to the Sierra Nevada mountains that mark the state's western border. But the Nevada most people know is a desert state: the driest in the nation, averaging less than 10 inches of precipitation annually, with summer temperatures in Las Vegas regularly exceeding 115°F. That this landscape supports 3.2 million people, a $70+ billion economy, and 40 million annual visitors is a feat of human engineering and commercial ingenuity that has few parallels in American history.

Nevada was built on silver, reborn on gambling, and now faces its greatest challenge: water. Lake Mead, the Colorado River reservoir created by Hoover Dam that supplies drinking water to Las Vegas and enables the entire Southwest's agricultural economy, has been declining for decades under the pressure of overallocation and climate change. How Nevada adapts to this constraint will define its next century as much as silver defined its first.