rcurl
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Las Vegas, NV
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Oct 12 05:08 UTC 1995 |
Las Vegas means "the meadows". There were once natural springs there, but
it was on the best route for a railroad to Los Angeles, so they were
co-opted, and pumped nearly dry. Now all one sees of "Las Vegas" is a
dreary, dry, vacant lot with pumps among the weeds. It is a fitting
metaphor for the city.
I went to Las Vegas for three days last week, to give a seminar and attend
a board meeting. I saw slots in the airport, but never saw the inside of a
casino, so I did not see what most visitors to Las Vegas go there to do.
There are also more interesting things to do in the region. These are a
few observations of such.
Flying into Las Vegas, and driving from the airport - at night - one sees
the "strip" of outrageous buildings illuminated in garish colors amidst
flashing signs. In daytime, the light is the sun, which in the Southwest
is all powerful: the tinsel glitter of the strip lies bare in glare,
immersed in smog and haze, amidst a maze of traffic glutted streets. Las
Vegas is the fastest growing city in the country, now topping one million
residents, and growing at 1,600 per month. Water is rare (the meadows
having been exhausted long ago) and is mostly pumped from Lake Mead, which
is where the waste water is sent - upstream of the intakes - for a few
moments in the sun.
I spent Friday at the Desert Research Institute, whose primary new project
concerns water supply in Ghana, and Saturday at the board meeting, which
was disposed of fast enough, under a grapevine ladden trellis. On Sunday
we went on a tour of the region, and got the best views of Las Vegas - from
outside.
We went 90 miles northwest, up the Wash, and south over a limb of the
Spring Mountains to Ash Meadows. Ash Meadows - "Ash Vegas"? - has springs
and meadows. It also has water, at least 24 plants and animals found
nowhere else in the world, and four fishes and one plant currently listed
as endangered. The valley is not a route to anywhere, so what happened to
the Las Vegas meadows came later to Ash Meadows in the form of alfalfa
farms pumping the springs and drying them up, extinguishing species. Las
Vegas probably also had a suite of -different - rare plants and animals,
of which we will never know anything. However by the time development came
to Ash Meadows, so did The Nature Conservancy, and the knowledge and
interest of the ecological community, from which came a National Wildlife
Refuge. A damaged one, to be sure, but the introduced saltcedar trees and
crayfish are being removed, and the habitats restored. The lost species
will never be. One surviving species, the Devil's Hole Pupfish, is found
only in a water filled sinkhole, perhaps 20 by 60 feet - and of unknown
depth - where the entire population of a few hundred fish have lived their
lives since being trapped there by the desertification of the Southwest
following the last glaciation.
From Ash Meadows we returned to Las Vegas via Pahrump, over which hovers
12,000 foot Mt. Charleston, providing nearly 10,000 feet of relief.
Distances and heights are deceptive. Mt. Charleston lay 15 miles away but
looked nearer. The Nopha and Kingston ranges were visible 20 and 40 miles
away to the south. We crossed the Spring Mountains again at Mountain
Springs (!), a small hamlet at the pass, and turned into Red Rock Canyon,
where the 400,000,000 year old paleozoic limestones can clearly be seen
atop the 200,000,000 year old Jurassic sandstones, with their brilliant
ferric blaze of red.
Heading east from there, one tops a rise, and there before one lies all of
Las Vegas, under a grimy cloud of dust and dirt, lying flat and
diminuative in the Wash, 20 miles away. It was tempting to think of the
whole dirty mess being again submerged in the absent glacial lakes, like
an Atlantis of human vainglory and greed.
Leaving those dry and dreary "meadows", we swung north, up to the Valley
of Fire, which were framed by the grey Paleozoic rising from the south and
the brilliant Jurassic keeping guard to the north. The valley was much
traveled by native Americans, and carved upon the desert varnish upon the
sandstones are those images of their thoughts that they chose to leave to
be seen after they were long gone: antelope, turtles, atlatls, suns and
serpents..and, who knows what they are?
The Valley of Fire descends to Lake Mead, but now it was time to end the
day, so the shimmering lake, the slack backwater of supposed progress, lay
to our east as we skirted the enclosing mountain walls. There are springs
along there too, surrounded by parking lots and sun shelters with picnic
tables - and a sign saying not to get any water from the cool, enticing,
spring pond into your nose, as there is present an amoeba, which kills.
The desert can bite in many ways.
Topping the last rise near sunset, the view is 5000 feet down into Las
Vegas. The latest monstrosity is dead ahead - an over 1000 foot tall tower
with a twenty-story hotel and casino on top, under construction but nearly
finished, jutting up from the murk, but diminutive so many thousands of
feet below and miles away. The sun sets, and the tinsel and glitter comes
out of its burrows, and the city mocks its inhabitants.
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