Dugway Proving Ground

Dugway sits 85 miles from Salt Lake City in the kind of Utah desert where your GPS gives up, your phone gets a notification saying 'good luck,' and the nearest neighbor is a pronghorn antelope who also looks confused about why either of you are here. They test chemical and biological defense systems here, which sounds exciting until you realize 'testing' means 'standing in protective gear in 105 degrees waiting for something to not kill you while the desert does its best to finish the job.' The installation is enormous — nearly 800,000 acres of restricted desert that looks like Mars had a yard sale — and the isolation is the point: when you're testing defensive measures against the worst things humans have ever invented, you want a lot of nothing between you and civilization. The night sky is pristine because light pollution requires people, and there are none: the Milky Way here is so vivid it looks fake, and the silence at night has a physical quality that takes getting used to. SLC weekends are the only thing between you and a conversation with your own existential dread — and Salt Lake delivers: skiing in the Wasatch, a growing food scene, and a city that's modernized faster than anyone expected. The Bonneville Salt Flats are nearby for feeling very small. The Great Basin desert wildflowers bloom briefly in spring like the landscape is apologizing for the rest of the year.