Question of the Day - 03 February 2024

Lake Sahara is a manmade body of water out at the Lakes subdivision. The Lakes was named for the originally planned two lakes, though only one was completed; it's an affluent two-square-mile master-planned and gated community comprising 300 homes and condos, from 1,500 to 12,000 square feet, divided into seven "villages," while the commercial areas consist of offices and business headquarters and a shopping plaza. 

The community occupies roughly a giant square of western Las Vegas, bounded on the west by Fort Apache Road and on the east by Durango Drive. Sahara Avenue and Desert Inn Road form the northern and southern boundaries, respectively. The lake itself runs north-south within these confines, with several digitated "lochs" branching out into the community and forming the centerpiece of the West Sahara Community Association.

The community association boasts that Lake Sahara is "the only place in Las Vegas where you can own your own shoreline on a private lake." It's stocked with bluegill, channel catfish, largemouth bass (up to four pounds), and sunfish and provides a home for the rare razorback sucker fish, along with freshwater turtles, ducks, geese, herons, cormorants, grebes, and many other types of migratory water fowl, such as Canada geese. Falcons have been known to make brief appearances. 

Housing styles veer eclectically from modern to faux Tudor, not to mention an enormous Romanesque mansion. 

The lake was started in 1984, when Sahara Avenue wasn't even paved that far out, and completed in 1986; Sahara had been paved to it by then. 

You can boat in it, subject to a long list of restrictions, including no inflatable boats, rafts, inner tubes, personal floating devices, windsurfers, sailboards, motor surfers, and jet skis.

Nor are you allowed to swim in it. The rules and regulations forbid "swimming, wading, diving, floating," etc. 

In the earliest years of The Lakes, Citibank located its main Citicard payment-processing center there (1985). The USPS designated two special zip codes to handle the vast volume of incoming and outgoing mail. But in order to avoid what in those days was the negative connotation of credit-card payments going to Las Vegas, the zip codes were assigned the name The Lakes, Nevada. That facility closed in 2014.