Nevada ATV Trail Guide
Nevada ATV Trails
The Best Nevada ATV Trails
With 92 trails for OHV, Nevada is a warm weather paradise for your ATV and UTV riding adventures, offering a variety of experiences ranging from tackling monstrous dunes and snaky mountain roads to rock climbing and testing your mettle in vast deserts. When you’re in Nevada and wondering where to ride ATVs or where the closest ATV trails near me are, the answer is easy: everywhere. 85% of Nevada is designated as unfenced, public land with thousands of miles of trails. Below is a list of just a few of the most popular Nevada OHV trails, compiled by the experts at Treadworld, with location information and websites where available.
Amargosa Valley Sand Dunes
Location: Located between Beatty and Pahrump, NV, along U.S. Highway 95
Website: https://wildatv.com/sand-dunes/big-dune/
With around five square miles, Amargosa Dunes isn’t huge, but off-roaders can count on some exciting, steep climbs on the dunes reaching up to 500 feet amidst the ever-changing, rolling sand. The area, which provides a critical habitat for the Big Dune beetle, a rare species that’s called the Amargosa Valley home for thousands of years, is also home to singing sand dunes, one of 30 singing dunes on the entire planet (3 of which are in Nevada). “Singing” is one way to describe the sound created by the wind or walking on the sand, but other ways include roaring, booming, whistling and barking. Sand tires are recommended for the best ATV riding experience at this locals’-favorite area.
Beatty to Goldfield Adventure Route
Location: From Beatty Nye County to Goldfield Esmerelda County in mid-southwestern NV
Beatty, NV, is known as Gateway to Death Valley National Park, and Goldfield, NV, is a small community known for being the site of a gold rush that began in 1902 and lasted until 1910. This adventure route between the two offers ATV and UTV riding trails that span around 115 miles of beautiful desert and mountain terrain. 4-wheeler riders can start in Beatty and head through the mountains to explore the historic ghost town of Gold Point, then continue on past mining and other historic sites on mostly dirt mining roads to Goldfield (and on another 28 miles to Tonopah, NV, if you wish). Keep an eye open for wild herds of burros along the way.
Bitter Springs Trail: a Backcountry Byway
Location: Clark County Nevada, in the southern-most corner of the state; begins at the Valley of Fire State Park and runs south along the foothills of the Muddy Mountains
Website: https://www.desertusa.com/desert-nevada/bitter-springs-trail.html
This 29-mile route open to ATV riding follows old mining roads and washes through the Muddy Mountains. Keep an eye peeled for the beautiful Buffington Pockets – natural basins that trap rain water, made up of striped, pink, yellow, white, orange, and red Aztec sandstone. Ancient tracks from the Old Spanish trail, a path created by Spanish explorers in 1776 and later by settlers and miners heading west, can be seen crossing the trail. Additionally, the area is known for a multitude of springs and water holes that attracted many travelers through the years, that left memorable petroglyphs, pictographs, rock art and ant hill shaped roasting pits. Though the trail starts out fairly smooth, it gets rough and wild about halfway through and you may need a high clearance ATV or UTV.
Black Rock Desert
Location: Northwest part of the state just outside of Gerlach, NV
Website: https://blackrockdesert.org/ohv/
Known as home to some of the most popular Nevada ATV trails, this vast, undeveloped area offers a combination of desert playgrounds, narrow canyons, and mountainous terrain with over 900 miles of primitive roads. This is a 1.2 million-acre national conservation and wilderness area that also includes the 400-square-miles-large Black Rock Desert Playa, the site of turbojet car races in which world land-speed records are frequently set and broken, and the federally protected, 180-mile stretch of historic emigrant trails used by early pioneers making their way west. Keep in mind that temperatures often settle over 100 degrees in this area, and during wet seasons some areas can become impassable to motor vehicles – but services are for the most part, few and far between.
Logandale OHV Trail System
Location: 60 minutes northeast of Las Vegas on I-15
Website: https://travelnevada.com/outdoor-recreation/logandale-trails-system/
Sometimes referred to as the Moapa Valley OHV Park by experienced locals, this system offers ATV riders and UTV riders over 200 miles of 4-wheeler riding spanning 45,000 acres including the Moapa Valley. The ATV riding trails are primarily dirt, sand and rock weaving through red rock canyons and colorful, red sandstone cliffs along the scenic eastern boundary of Valley of Fire State Park. Keep an eye out for ancient petroglyphs left by the region’s first inhabitants, along with wildlife and rare plants that are in many cases found nowhere else in the world. These Nevada off-road trails offer something to challenge every level of ATV trail riding skill.
Moon Rocks/ Hungry Valley Recreational Area
Location: Outside Reno and Sparks, NV
Website: https://www.trailsoffroad.com/trails/4647-moon-rocks-area
Moon Rocks is what local riders of Nevada OHV trails call the Hungry Valley Recreational Area because of the huge granite rock formations that make you feel like you’re traversing the surface of the moon. It’s a wonderful area for enjoying everything from relatively relaxing ATV and UTV riding and exploring to challenging rock-crawling. Since there are no designated trails, you can make your own routes in any direction, and go at whatever pace you like.
Mormon Mesa
Location: between the towns of Moapa, Overton and Mesquite, NV
Website: https://ohv.nv.gov/trails/mormon-mesa
A flat-topped mesa with near-vertical cliffs that extends north and south around the Mormon Mountains, Mormon Mesa has been a crossroads for travelers and early settlers for centuries, providing a challenging task for the early Mormon settlers heading north to Utah. It’s an important landmark along the Old Spanish Trail, formed millions of years ago due to erosion caused by the Virgin River to the east and the Muddy River to west. This area was noted and mapped by explorer John C. Fremont in 1844. Riding the approximately 20 miles of trails is considered of easy to moderate difficulty, but the wilderness views are considered A++, including great views of the Virgin River and Mountains, and the Double Negative Earthwork, a work of land art by the artist Michael Heizer consisting of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, completed in 1969-70.
Sand Mountain Recreation Area
Location: Churchill County in Midwestern Nevada, 25 miles southeast of Fallon, NV
Website: https://www.blm.gov/visit/sand-mountain-recreation-area
When it comes to off-roading in Nevada, this 4,795 designated OHV fee area provides around 23 miles of “can’t miss” ATV trails for several reasons. First, thanks to the deposit of fine, windblown sand that gets stopped by the rising Stillwater Mountains bordering to the north, east and west, this area offers huge sand dunes, including the largest, Sand Mountain, which is 3.5 miles long, 1 mile wide and 600 feet high. Sand Mountain is a singing sand dune, which is to say that when you ride it, it moans loudly. Singing sand is rare, and has to do with the shape of the grains of sand and the way they rub each other. Keep a lookout for the Sand Mountain Blue Butterfly, native only to the Sand Mountain area.
Silver State Trail System
Location: Lincoln County in southeastern Nevada
Website: https://ohv.nv.gov/trails/silver-state-trail-system
With some of the best ATV trails Nevada has to offer, this area is a riders’ paradise that was the first Congressionally-designated OHV trail ever, looping through 260 miles of wild Nevada backcountry. The trail incorporates a multitude of dirt and gravel roads, plus more challenging trails and tracks that crisscross open valleys, panoramic basins and desert canyons, and weave up mountains with steep rocky slopes dotted by pinyon and juniper trees. The trail provides many linkages between the towns of Caliente, Alamo, Pioche and Panaca, NV, four state parks, Mesquite, NV, and the state border.
Around the Las Vegas Area
Location: Clark County Nevada, the largest city within the Mojave Desert
As much as the city of Las Vegas is known for gambling, entertainment and fun (or sin, you choose), it’s the ATV riding in Las Vegas that brings many people to the area, offering some of the best ATV and UTV trails in the nation…miles and miles of them, with something for every skill level. With choices ranging from towering sand dunes and twisty mountain roads, to Moab-style rocks and vast deserts, it’s no wonder 4-wheeler riding in Las Vegas is so popular. For instance, there’s the beautiful but challenging 6-mile Mount Potosi OHV Trail that is recommended for highly experienced riders because it traverses one of many major peaks in the Spring Mountains and is steep in some sections. The Mojave National Preserve features cinder-cone volcanoes, spring wildflowers, canyons, old mines, and rock-walled military outposts. The nearly 32-mile Wheeler Pass OHV Trail is one of the more popular off-road trails Las Vegas is known for, offering spectacular wildlife views along with riding challenges that may require better than average ground clearance. The off-road trails Las Vegas offers are many – or, if you prefer, you can go on one of the many available Vegas ATV tour.
That’s Just a Few
Part of the beauty of ATV trails in Nevada is that they’re pretty much unlike the trails you’ll find anywhere else in the nation, as you travel along mountain roads hugging cliffs, climb towering sand dunes, and roll through vast expanses of desert terrain. That’s just the start for the state that has more public land than anywhere else in the continental U.S. We’ve only highlighted a few of the many Nevada ATV trails here, but you’ll be able to find hundreds more throughout the state, with very little effort.
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Whether you’re ATV and UTV trail riding in Nevada or anywhere else in the U.S., you can count on us to provide you with the dependable, high performance Master ATV and UTV Tires you want. Here at Treadworld, we have the right ATV tires for every type of adventure riding, in every part of the country. The ATV tires we provide you with offer the finest in top quality, long-lasting, never-let-you-down reliability, manufactured with strict tolerances from top rubber compounds, triple-tested for quality before being X-rayed to be sure they’re perfect, then covered by our Ultimate Advantage Lifetime Warranty. Don’t hesitate to contact our tire experts via live chat or email with any questions you may have on the best ATV tires for you.
