Outside a Taco Bell in south-east Las Vegas, Skateboard Mike crossed an empty parking lot and pointed at the tent encampment that had built up on the ledges of a storm drain.

Skateboard Mike, whose real name is Michael Brinkman, lives nearby, spending his nights in a hole he dug in a dirt lot. The space is filled with couch cushions, and Brinkman, 42, usually tops the hole with cardboard and tumbleweed to avoid being exposed.

“It’s not that we’re here. It’s that they see us,” Brinkman said.

The Clark county death investigator Jill Roberts vividly recalls the sunny 115F (46C) afternoon last summer when she entered a Las Vegas home with no functional air conditioning. The indoor heat felt even worse than the broiling temperature outside. She climbed up the stairs, through thick, stifling air, landing in a third-story bedroom where the resident had died in sweltering conditions. The room had no fan and the door was shut. It felt as if it couldn’t get any hotter.

“Our elements are unforgiving. Especially on those 115F days, it doesn’t take a lot,” Roberts told the Guardian.

Sunrise Hospital’s emergency room was already full at about 10pm on 1 October when a police officer dropping off an accident victim received a call on his radio announcing: “Shots fired.”

Doctor Kevin Menes and nurse Rhonda Davis looked up from their charts. “Is this for real?” Menes asked. A series of gunshots crackled through the officer’s radio in automatic bursts. It sounded like a combat zone. As he ran out, the officer said, “That’s the Route 91 concert.”

“The news said it all,” said Jackie Hoffing, her eyes glassy, still in a clear state of trauma. “We were there enjoying our time, and it was very obvious it was gunfire coming down into the crowd.

“It was hysteria. There were people trampled. We jumped walls, climbed cars, ran for our lives. I’ve never run that hard or been that scared in my whole life.”

In Pahrump, Nevada – a desert enclave famous for its “live and let live” spirit – you can openly carry a gun, race sports cars, buy marijuana, own lions, gamble and purchase sex. But there’s a movement under way to rein in the frontier town’s freedom-loving ways.

During a recent staff meeting at Sheri’s Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada, a sex worker named Erin educated her colleagues on the ins and outs of using, then cleaning, a prostate massager. It was a routine meeting, even if wielding the S-shaped device would be anything but.

Broken glass crunched under shoes, alerting tunnel dwellers that outsiders had arrived. Deeper in the dark, squat-ceilinged space, 25ft below the Las Vegas strip, Kregg Nattrour rested on a pile of gutted mattress foam.

“I wanted to make this my last month down here,” he said. “I can’t handle another month of this.”

When Hailey Allen walked into an athletic store two years ago, she saw a pair of workout shorts identical to the ones worn by the man who drugged and raped her when she was a freshman at BYU in 2004. Suddenly, she felt as if the assailant was right there in the room.

“My whole body froze and I could feel myself shaking. I couldn’t talk or move and felt completely helpless.”

“This horse is not used to being in a cage, and I’m not used to being in a cage either, so we have that bond,” Verdugo says after his ride. “It’s up to me to make sure he doesn’t revert to being mean and scaring people. We have to respect and trust each other enough to get out.”

That would happen soon enough for the horse – every four months, the prison hosts an adoption event where a couple of hundred locals bid on the “freshly broke” geldings, mares and burros.

“I felt bad doing this at first. It bothers our families,” one worker, a woman named Consuela, said. “The siblings, the parents, the spouses – they don’t like that we do this.”

Neither does the rest of Las Vegas. Targeted for citations by police, barred from casinos, singled out by lawmakers and frequently accosted by tourists, the handbillers are – like the women on their cards – among the most disenfranchised workers in the city.

“At the Tipsy Robot in Las Vegas, a mechanical arm mixes cocktails that patrons order on tablet computers. “Galactic ambassadors” – human waitresses in shiny silver skirts – are sometimes available to deliver drinks. But the underlying message at the future-themed bar is that humans are irrelevant.”

Like something out of a spaghetti western, the dustup had already seen several climaxes before its finale: cows lassoed by government wranglers, women knocked to the ground and men shot with stun guns.

And it all came to a head because of the reclusive desert tortoise.

Dominic "The Dice Dominator" LoRiggio is the greatest craps player to ever live, a complete huckster, or both—it depends who you ask.

According to the 63-year-old gambler, his method of "dice control" has won him so much money he's been banned from most casinos in Las Vegas and Mississippi, and the many disciples to whom he's taught this method regularly make tens of thousands of dollars shooting bones.

From his car, Metro officer Aaron Perez focuses his binoculars on a young woman standing by a white picket fence outside the Lamplighter Motel. It’s a cold day, yet she’s wearing short shorts. Between her and us is a vacant lot — the last piece of real estate on East Fremont before the city jurisdiction ends.

Mark Twain once joked that “whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.” A lesser-known fact of Twain’s life is that he lobbied vigorously for stronger copyright protections, vexed by piracy of his work both at home and abroad. “They talk handsomely about the literature of the land,” Twain told a House committee in 1906. “And in the midst of their enthusiasm, they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.”

When Tom and Terry Sullivan go to the movies, they attend the Century 16 Aurora and sit next to row 12, seat 12 in Theater I. That’s where their son, Alex, was killed when a premiere for The Dark Knight Rises became the scene of a massacre. Holding down the seat cushion, the Sullivans imagine Alex is there. They save his seat. Holding back tears, Tom calls it “the best seat in the house.”

It’s uncomfortable to watch the inevitable winner bash his defenseless opponent’s head in with a “ground and pound” flurry of hammer-fist blows. The loser is usually writhing on his back, and that effort convinces the referee to let it play out. The crowd, meanwhile, knows it’s over, the ref pretty much knows it’s over, the winner and loser know who the winner and loser will be, but everyone has to let this violent coda play out because, as often happens, the loser refuses to tap out. Some might find this beautiful. The vanquished man struggling against his pride and what he feels he owes his supporters. You can see this tortured negotiation between pain and ego going on in his eyes when he’s not shutting them as the knuckles land. He won’t do it, can’t tap out, not without another vain attempt to squirm free. He just about always fails to block the punches raining down again, again. Again. The winner is good at finding unprotected flesh. Finally, the ref calls the match.

One night in June 2010, Las Vegas police knocked on the door of a man named Trevon Cole, a marijuana dealer who they believed they had a warrant to arrest. No one answered the door so the police raided the apartment with weapons drawn. Cole was in the bathroom flushing his marijuana down the toilet, and according to the detective who found him, he lunged at the officer—a claim contradicted by physical evidence gathered after the officer used deadly force.

Cole was killed even though he was unarmed. It would be a record year for officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, and Cole’s death was one of several high-profile incidents which led to calls to reform what seemed to be a trigger-happy police force.

There are cockroaches inside the lockers at Hyde Park middle school in Las Vegas, so Victoria Piñeiro, 13, carries her lunchbox, violin and heavy backpack with her all day long. She attends classes under ceilings that leak during rainstorms. And on hot afternoons, school is often canceled because the air conditioning has broken down.

Victoria told Nevada lawmakers this at an educational forum in April 2015, begging them to prioritize funding for a state school system ranked dead last in the nation.

A couple seated at a high-top table smoked a joint, while six tourists in a circular booth nearby drank THC-infused beer and reviewed the flower menu. It was the morning of the Southern Paiute’s traditional hunt, when tribal youth learn to shoot and harvest mule deer as adult “providers”, but Benny Tso, 43, was stuck in the Las Vegas Paiute’s new cannabis tasting room, taking meetings and making calls.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, it’s almost unseemly how perfect a microcosm the Las Vegas Strip is of American politics. Trump has his name on the skyline. His friend Steve Wynn, the resort mogul, served as the Republican National Committee finance chair until he resigned in January amid sexual harassment and assault allegations. The most active Republican donor in the country, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, owns the palatial Venetian resort. And then you have the hotel maids, bartenders, cooks, bellhops and cocktail waitresses who make up the Culinary Union, perhaps the most potent force for Nevada Democrats to galvanize voters each election cycle.

Be it the legacy of the west’s freedom-loving frontiersmen, the high tolerance of an ever-growing cannabis culture, or the same chill vibes that drew the likes of Jack Kerouac, John Denver and Hunter S Thompson, something about Colorado has made its capital city the closest thing America has to a new Amsterdam when it comes to liberal drug policies.