My Visiting Las Vegas - Essay Example

 My Visiting Las Vegas A trip to Las Vegas can have all kinds of different experiences for people depending on what they decide to see and do. When my girlfriend and I went there, we decided not to focus so much on the gambling areas as on the other things that the city has to offer. While on our trip, we decided to visit Hoover Dam, the Zoological Botanical Park and the Clark County Park Heritage Museum. We also took an air flight tour of the surrounding area, an adventure canyon ride and stopped by a Chloride mining town. Visiting all these places gave us a great sense of the characteristics of the city apart from its gambling center and allowed us to have a much better time for probably a lot less money spent (or rather lost) at the tables. When you visit Hoover Dam, it’s really hard not to be overcome by the amount of work that had to have gone into building the structure. It sweeps up out of the canyon to such a height that it makes people at the bottom difficult to pick out among the other spots of darkness down there. It’s so graceful and smooth, you almost feel like it would be fun to slide down the side, even though it would be suicide to do so. Lake Mead is on the other side of the dam, providing a sparkling contrast to the thin strip of a river you see flowing away on the first side. The mountain sides on either side of the dam show white water marks where the lake levels used to be before so many people moved in and started making more demands on the water supply, which really makes you start to think about what can be done to conserve more water. It’s also kind of interesting to stand in the middle of the dam, where you can have one foot in Nevada and one foot in Arizona while you’re standing about 700 feet above the ground and in the middle of the Colorado River. The tour of the dam is interesting, too, because you’re allowed to walk around inside the dam and see what makes it work to help generate power. Some places on the wall seem a little damp as you walk through, which makes you think even more about the almost 100 men who died while building the dam and what would happen if the concrete walls just decided to stop holding together all of a sudden. After touring the inside of the dam, it was a relief to get back out into open air and away from the center of the river in order to take an air tour of the area. The views of the Grand Canyon were especially amazing, thinking about how the river that had been contained by the dam had also carved out these amazing shapes through sheer rock to such an incredible depth. We could see the various rock layers on the cliff walls even from the helicopter and the ability to get a bird’s eye view like this was practically indescribable. With the helicopter, we were able to circle around some of the rocks that jut up out of the canyon from the floor, with no easy access from the ground. These are the places where the eagles and other large birds roost. It seems awfully lonely and desolate, but I guess if you have your own wings, it isn’t so bad. After seeing it from the air, we had to go down and experience the canyon on our own level, so we took an adventure canyon ride into the canyon itself. We went down over the west rim of the canyon via helicopter, landing on the floor of the canyon below. We were able to walk around down there and experience what it was like to be surrounded by stone in all directions but up. Walking down to the river’s edge, we took a short boat ride along a smooth part of the Colorado River before going back up to the top rim and exploring up there. Being able to see, hear, smell and touch the canyon in this way made it much more real for us than simply flying over it, but we were glad we’d taken the other tour as well to give us a chance to put things in perspective. On the way back to Vegas, we stopped at a little town called Chloride, which is a small abandoned mining town located just off the freeway from Hoover Dam. The tour explained that Chloride was a type of ore that usually covered gold, silver, lead, zinc and turquoise. Although the town grew a lot when silver was found in the area, everyone moved out when the mining industry went bust. But because everyone liked the climate in Nevada and it was close to fresh water, some people decided to stay and others moved in. The downtown area still looks the way it did in the mining days, with the small store fronts and the Russell Saloon and Café. About the only modern conveniences that were immediately obvious as we came in was a refrigerated ice machine standing on the front porch, an air conditioning unit peeking out of a front window and a newspaper rack with the latest issue of the local news. We were told a famous artist of the area went up onto the mountains and painted murals on the rocks by the mines, but we weren’t able to get time to go up and see them before we had to leave. We were lucky enough to have been visiting on a Saturday when the gunfights take place, though, so we witnessed a real old-fashioned shoot-out right there in the town. Returning to the city itself, my girlfriend and I decided to go see the Zoological Botanical Park. We thought it was interesting that the two things were combined when most cities feature either a zoo or a garden or each separately. The zoo itself didn’t have a lot of animals, but the animals it had were pretty interesting. For instance, they had a lot of swamp wallabies, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. They look kind of like a cross between a kangaroo and a rabbit and are supposedly pretty rare, since their only natural habitat is on the east coast of Australia. The zoo also had Barbary apes, which are tailless monkeys. According to the signs at the zoo, this is the last family of these types of apes anywhere in America. Maybe one of the weirdest animals we saw was the Fossa, which was kind of like a cross between a dog and a cat, but it moved more like a weasel. I was a special fan of the tiger, Mowar, but my girlfriend really liked the river otters, because she said they were too cute to miss. Our last visit was made to the Clark County Park Heritage Museum. If our deliberate attempts to stay away from the casinos hadn’t been successful in showing us that there was a lot more to Las Vegas than simply gangsters and gambling, this would have done the trick. The museum provided us with a living history of the city and state from its earliest known activity. This means the information, as much as is available, about the Indians who first moved to the area and how they lived as well as the first entry of high-stakes gambling. It was difficult to imagine the Indian dwellings existing in the same place as the Stardust is now and it was almost impossible to comprehend the vast difference between the simple lifestyle of the Indians, as they lived off the land with no modern technology, and the opulent lifestyle of the big gamblers and casino owners with their luxury cars and heavily textured, modernized living spaces. Although it’s impossible to avoid the strip altogether, we felt we had experienced Las Vegas in a much more meaningful way during our stay than most people will ever realize. Read More