As reported in Today's News, Las Vegas' newest cultural attraction is the Springs Preserve, a $250 million 180-acre environment that opened on June 8 and celebrates Big Springs, the original oasis in the fierce eastern Mojave Desert that supported indigenous people for thousands of years, inspired the Spanish name Las Vegas ("the Meadows"), and attracted settlers to the big valley that surrounded it.
Big Springs served as a primary water source for early explorers, Latter-day Saints who established a short-lived mission nearby in the mid-1850s, ranchers who followed the Mormons to settle the valley, and the Salt Lake-Los Angeles railroad that founded Las Vegas as a service stop for its steam-powered locomotives.
After the city was established in 1905, Big Springs was used as a well field from which a pipeline delivered water to downtown. But with more and more residents and businesses tapping into the ground water, the aquifer that fed the springs was depleted; it basically disappeared in the 1930s and Big Springs was essentially forgotten.
Claude Warren, a local archaeologist, got interested in the area and excavated it in 1972. Thanks, in part, to his discovery of pottery, arrowheads, and milling stones dating back 8,000 years, Big Springs was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. For the past 35 years or so, Friends of Big Springs, particularly Elizabeth Warren, Claude's wife, fought to save the area from vandals, squatters, developers, and the state Department of Transportation, which wanted to take 14 acres of the site to widen US 95.
Today, the Preserve attraction consists of 176,000 square feet of museum space, an 1,800-seat outdoor amphitheater, a desert botanical garden with 30,000 plants, and two-and-a-half miles of hiking trails surrounded by wetlands.
There's an Orientation Plaza at the main entrance, backed by the big amphitheater. A Guest Services building contains a gift shop and café. The Desert Living Center hosts several buildings with a temporary exhibit gallery, a sustainability gallery, a nature exchange, and a kids' outdoor playground. The ORI-GEN Experience houses two historic museums, an indoor theater, and a children's gallery. Demonstration gardens, a design lab, and a technical training center round out the facilities. Under construction is a 79,000-square-foot building that will house the new Nevada State Museum, opening in 2009.
As an aside, Friends of the Big Springs spent 35 years fighting to keep the area the way it was; the group's original plans for the preserve were decidedly less commercial. Elizabeth Warren told a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter that she envisioned the Preserve as "a place for people to try to understand why anyone came here to begin with." Friends of the Big Springs were reportedly shut out from the facility's planning; Elizabeth Warren calls it "an overbuilt $250 million entertainment complex -- just like the rest of Las Vegas. All flash."
Be that as it may, the Springs Preserve is located on Meadows Lane off of Valley View Blvd., near Meadows Mall. It's open 10 am-10 pm daily during the summer, 10 am-6 pm the rest of the year; trails close at dusk. Admission is $18.95 for adults, $14.95 for Nevada residents, $13.45 for students, and $10.95 for children 5-17.
