A glimpse of Las Vegas’ past — and future

updated 1:52 p.m. ET Aug. 8, 2007

LAS VEGAS - It's been 178 years since a New Mexican merchant found a spring surrounded by scarce greenery in the parched Mojave Desert and called it the Spanish word for "the meadows."

Now the water source that gave Las Vegas its name and slaked the thirsts of travelers on the Old Spanish Trail is getting new life in a typically Las Vegas way: reimagined and recreated, bigger and better.

The Las Vegas Springs Preserve, which is designed to show Las Vegas' past and provide a glimpse at a sustainable future, opened in June at a cost of $250 million reaped from the sale of federal land around southern Nevada.

It's close enough to see the stunning skyline of the lavish resorts featuring dancing fountains on the Strip, but a world away when meandering from trail to gallery to garden. Everything is wheelchair-accessible.

"Ideally, this represents to Las Vegas what Central Park represents to New York City," preserve spokesman Jesse Davis said, expressing a theme as carefully crafted as the faux rock canyons and the centerpiece five-building Desert Living Center.

Water doesn't trickle here naturally any more. That's lesson one at the Springs Preserve.

But it gushes like a flash flood through "Mojave Canyon" at the OriGen Experience, an interactive exhibit hall sure to excite the kids while teaching about the desert, its dwellers, its dangers and its future. Designers call it a "playducational" museum.

"It felt like it was real," exclaimed 10-year-old Jules Jaget, a Las Vegas fifth-grader who said she was surprised when 5,000 gallons of recycled water whooshed down a recreated desert ravine in front of her and rushed beneath the walkway at her feet.

Water — whether too much or too little — is the elemental theme of the 180-acre preserve, three miles west of downtown.

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"It's a cultural focal point, a historic centerpiece," Davis said, "something that offers something for everyone."

A hot summer day found moms with their children and their children's' playmates disappearing into exhibit nooks, playgrounds and the gift shop.

"This is great to do with kids on vacation," said Cristi Milad, 38, a mother chaperoning four children, including Jaget, who said she also liked learning about furry, feathered and scaly desert critters, and the night-vision exhibit showing owls hunting lizards by moonlight beneath creosote bushes.

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"We can occupy them for many hours, it's educational, and there's air conditioning inside when you need to be out of the sun," Milad said.

No neon or gambling here — although there are echoes of slot machines in the wow-your-teen interactive arcade, and a card-dealing video rewards correct answers to questions about Las Vegas with virtual stacks of poker-style chips.

If you go ... LAS VEGAS SPRINGS PRESERVE: Located on U.S. Highway 95 at Valley View Boulevard, three miles west of downtown Las Vegas (across from Meadows Mall shopping center); http://www.springspreserve.org or 702-822-7700. Open daily 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Trails and gardens close at dusk. Adults, $18.95; ages 5-17, $10.95; 4 and under, free; students and ages 65 and older, $17.05. A Wolfgang Puck cafe is scheduled to open later this summer.

Fact: "The average annual rainfall in Las Vegas is 4.49 inches." So says the writing on the wall between a Pacman style "Lawn Gobbler" video game that devours grassy turf toward a goal of helping to keep Lake Mead full.

A theater shows how the reservoir was formed with the construction of the colossal Hoover Dam on the Colorado River: 1935, a crucial date for a region that now gets almost all its drinking water from the nearby lake.

Visitors get to see how Pueblo Indians lived here for eons before merchant and explorer Antonio Armijo arrived in 1829; and how the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad followed, put in a water stop, and held a large land auction in 1905.

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