A shabby peach convertible hogged the front yard. It stretched out like a sunbathing teenage girl would – at a long diagonal, facing the street, just begging to get picked up.

I walked right up to her, crouching down at the battered grill, where both headlights were missing, like gems pried out of a ring's bed. I'd forgotten how much headlights, when you're squarely in front of an old car, look like eyes. In this case: doe-eyes, blank and coquettish.

I had just a moment to photograph; the dogs would soon bark. Whose dogs? Anyone's dogs. Everyone's dogs. In Cleveland, a one-street town deep in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains, I could count on two things: rusty cars, crowding front and backyards, and dogs, roaming said yards, ready to bark at me.

I'd first chanced upon Cleveland on a road trip from Taos – a long, meandering ride through fields and hillsides where the chipping hoods of old sedans kept peeking out of the sagebrush. New Mexico, I'd decided, was where cars go to die.

But nothing prepared me for the Mora Valley. Here was a place with more dead cars than living people. They filled pastures and slumped down ravines, their tires folded over in rolls, windshields cracked like lightning bolts. Two hours southeast and many mountain passes from Taos, I found myself in the true rust belt of America, wondering what joker named it Cleveland.

Gallery: The Junk Cars of Cleveland, New Mexico

Follow Colleen Kinder through Mexico City's Central De Abasto market in Gadling's first audio slideshow.

It concerns me that the gas station attendant has never heard of Steins. We are one stop away from Steins on New Mexico's Interstate 10. It's basically this gas station, flat desert, some yucca plants, then Steins. I could walk to my destination from here. Granted, I might get sunstroke and also scary close to the vultures on the fences, but the point is we're that close. "Sorry ma'am," he shakes his head. "I don't know that town."

I keep calm, knowing Steins doesn't fit everyone's definition of a town. Not since the mid-1940s has Steins had much street traffic. That was when the Southern Pacific Railroad switched from steam to diesel, shutting down this depot town virtually overnight. It's the classic ghost town tale – a settlement of transients and dreamers who fled as abruptly as they came – except that Steins was never completely abandoned.

There was always someone hanging on: first, the bordello madams, and later, a lone man who got his pick of the cluttered homes. For over 40 years, the adobes slouched and the barns blanched to gray, but Steins, unlike so many of the old boomtowns that dot the map of New Mexico, was never left to the elements, and never looted.

It's no small relief to see a woman on the porch of the old town store, under the chipped white letters, STEINS MERCANTILE. There's a cattle grate to bump over, and just past it, an outburst of prickly pear cacti, holding their pert needles up to the desert sun. It's just after 9 a.m. and already, the desert's cooking.

The woman stands and watches me pull up – apparently, I'm today's first guest. Steins, after a full year of closure, just reopened in May. I scoured the web for an official site to confirm its new hours, but all the search results led me instead to the story of Larry Link.

Gallery: Steins, New mexico

No one travels alone to the hottest place on earth. You need, for starters, a driver and a Jeep stocked with water bottles and four days of non-perishable food. And because that Jeep is bound to sink in the fine sand of the desert, you need another Jeep (and another driver) to tug it out. There are no places to lodge or dine in this desert, so you'll need space for cots, a cook, plus a few armed guards, because the hottest place on earth is also somewhat lawless. And finally, because an entourage of this size costs many thousands of dollars, you'll need some fellow travelers to split the bill – the sort of people who like to fry themselves on vacation.

My father is the easiest recruit. Dad, who naps best roasting in the afternoon sun, is a lover of extreme heat. He's also an extreme traveler, drawn to the fringes of places, all the countries where no one honeymoons. Alone, he's wandered Rwanda, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan and Sierra Leone. From my father, I've inherited both tendencies: I'm known for getting pig-pink sunburns, and also for stalking the edges of maps.

The Danakil desert lies on the fringes of three maps – the maps of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. All three countries claim a sliver of this sweltering, low-lying desert, named the cruelest place on earth by National Geographic. It's also a tectonic triple juncture – three plates converge here – as well as a major volcanic hub. I don't have to mention any of this to my father – not the endless salt flats, lakes the color of Listerine, or camels by the thousands. When Dad starts calling this desert "the Frying Pan," I know he's in.

On a message board, I find two more people to enlist – a concert pianist and a computer engineer. Both are keen on reaching the Danakil in early December – the mildest time of year in the cruelest place on earth.

Gallery: Dallol, Ethiopia