Where is the divide in real life?

The Divide does not actually exist in the real world. It is a fictional landscape conceived by the creators of Fallout: New Vegas and its DLC expansion Lonesome Road. However, its visual inspiration and geography seem to draw heavily from the striking yet uncanny desert vistas found along the California/Nevada border.

Specifically, The Divide‘s stark valleys, radioactive storms, and demolished ruins mirror Death Valley National Park, former nuclear weapons test zones, and the remote highways that connect them all in the American Southwest. The Courier‘s fateful delivery unintentionally brought explosive devastation to what had been a thriving community situated along these already ominous spaces.

Real-World Inspirations

Death Valley National Park

Stretched across the California-Nevada state line, Death Valley encompasses some of North America’s most extreme desert terrain within its 5,270 square mile basin. The Divide’s bare rock spires, deep shadowed canyons, and sun-scorched crater-like depressions strikingly resemble Death Valley across several key geographical signatures:

Elevation Extremes:

Average Summer Temperature Highs:

Ruined highways twisted by sinkholes and rock falls in The Divide (left) mimic Death Valley‘s harsh, arid terrain (right).

The extreme elevation ranges descend from towering peaks down to cratered, salts flats mirroring 190 miles southeast to Death Valley’s own dizzying topographical shifts. Oppressive heat also bears down on The Divide – rivaling real-world summer temperature averages within the national park named after fatal extremes.

Nevada National Security Site

Previously holding the ominous title of Nevada Test Site, this 1,360 square mile swath of the Mojave Desert is scarred by immense nuclear blast craters and demolished test structures. Between 1951 and 1992, over 1,000 atomic detonations occurred as the Cold War pushed experimental weapons development to its limits.

The aftermath of these massive explosions left behind radioactive fallout, towering atomic cloud spikes, and 50-foot-deep debris bowls – surreal landscapes reimagined in The Divide‘s constant irradiated dust storms and missile crater pockmarks surrounding the Ashton silo facility.

Warheads tested 9 miles southwest at the security site (left) likely inspired The Divide’s missile silos and radioactive pit mines (right).

By translating the true brutality of 20th century nuclear arms testing into this mythical location, Fallout: New Vegas created an even more ominous backdrop for the Courier’s delivery-gone-wrong and its civilizations-ending consequences.

U.S. Route 95

Snaking 1,724 miles alongside the Sierra Nevada and through the Mojave desert brushlands, Highway 95 traces a remote path across California and Nevada. In the early years after World War II, the route passed near government weapons facilities and atomic proving grounds before traversing mountains, skirting test craters, and eventually winding north of Death Valley towards the state border.

Does its mid-century isolation resemble the same demolished interstate highway cutting through The Divide’s irradiated valleys? We glimpse collapsed overpass bridges along the ruins reminiscent of Route 95’s towering viaducts built to handle atomic equipment transport in those Cold War decades.

Like Highway 95 (left), The Divide’s ruined freeway bridges (right) connected remote military sites and weapon testing grounds

Ulysses himself confirms that place names seen on Divide map markers also exist in the real Mojave wasteland – revealing how this overrun landscape truly sits upon reimagined sections of California and western Nevada.

More Than Fiction

While The Divide will only ever exist within the lore of this legendary post-nuclear RPG franchise, its devastated contours finds unsettling reflections in real-world landscapes that seemingly border the edge of the world – or at least epochal man-made catastrophes.

In reimagining catastrophic damage wrought by these 20th century atomic testing grounds, the New Vegas creators built an even more ominous frontier for players to reckon with difficult questions:

Can civilizations fully recover from near-annihilation events decades later? Do future societies ever break free from the technological extremes that created such devastation in the first place? Or does the shadow those long demolished corporate, military, and government sites cast across the land sow fatalism about humanity’s true capacity for enduring change?

Perhaps the Divide’s harsh mirrored frontiers thus speak to modern anxieties about living in the lingering aftermath that historical nuclear arms races and catastrophic detonations still evoke today…