“We came for an alien souvenir,” said Shihgo Miyamoto, 29, who was holding his wife, Yoko, both shivering in the high-desert wind. I took their picture under an official Nevada Department of Transportation Extraterrestrial Highway sign, a sprawl of trailer homes in the background.

“So cold, so empty,” said Mr. Miyamoto, looking to the desert beyond his rental car.

SOUTH-CENTRAL Nevada is, by and large, a vast wasteland, scrubby and unpopulated, dotted with dry lakes, streaked with tan rocky peaks, ravines and wide alluvial plains. Government land is ubiquitous. Cattle guards rumble under tires on the barren highways, which cut through sand and open range. To drive the Extraterrestrial Highway — a route that snakes northwest for 98 empty miles, intersecting no other major roads — is to drive one of the most desolate stretches of pavement in the country. Gasoline is unavailable for its entire length. R.V.’s cannot hook up in Rachel, the only town on the road.

According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, an average of about 200 cars drive some portion of the Extraterrestrial Highway every day, making it one of the state’s least traveled routes.

On my midday drive up the highway in February, I saw only six other vehicles.

Coming north from the town of Alamo, where I stayed overnight in a cabin, the Extraterrestrial Highway began as an innocuous flat road through scrubby highlands. A mile or so in, a large silver Quonset hut announced itself as the New Alien Research Center, but its driveway was gated, so I drove on by.

The road bobbed through a Martian landscape, red valleys raked with lines, flat expanses of gravel and dead shrubs, all ringed by hulking mountains of stratified stone.

A hawk hung high in the air. Joshua trees reached for the sun, their bristled bunches aglow, seemingly illuminated from within.