Our Grand Adventure
Was MGM’s strange, doomed theme park ahead of its time?
POWER. SPEED. GRACE.
MY ROLLER COASTER LOVE AFFAIR
It has its ups and downs
THE GIFT OF GRAB
How I found a second family in catchball
T R AV E L
Are We There Yet?! Family road trips that won’t strain your sanity
GO TEAM FLAVOR!
Stadium food goes gourmet
Champions on the Rise
MEET TOMORROW’S SUPERSTAR ATHLETES Speed demon
TRYSTIN MITCHELL
U.S. $4.99
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VOLUME 20 ISSUE 2 D E S E R T C O M PA N I O N . C O M
April/May ALL THINGS 9 SPORTS
The alternative pro league model of Athletes Unlimited By Ganny Belloni
12 DISCOMFORT ZONE
Catchball: part sport, part support system By Beth Schwartz
16 BUSINESS
17 OPEN TOPIC
E-bikes cruise into the cycling mainstream, like it or not By Mike Weatherford
20 PROFILE
A blind skateboarder finds freedom in adaptive competition By Jason Harris
FEATURE
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FOOD
CULTURE
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34
DRINK
WRITER IN RESIDENCE
Popcorn! Peanuts! Cheeseburger bao? Today’s stadium eats By Jason Harris
A Seattle coffeehouse in Commercial Center By Andrew Kiraly
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36 ESSAY
Vegas as “the perpetual wardrobe change” By Jennifer Battisti
Where tomorrow’s superstar Las Vegas athletes are today
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40
WE TRIPPIN’
HISTORY
Was MGM Grand Adventures ahead of its time? By Greg Blake Miller
Fun family road trips ... with tips!
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EDITOR’S NOTE
SENSE OF PLACE
Hearing the sound of your own heartbeat at Zia Records By Gabriela Rodriguez
Our Grand Adventure
Was MGM’s strange, doomed theme park ahead of its time?
POWER. SPEED. GRACE. MEET TOMORROW’S SUPERSTAR ATHLETES
U.S. $4.99
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A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
It has its ups and downs
THE GIFT OF GRAB
How I found a second family in catchball
T R AV E L
Are We There Yet?! Family road trips that won’t strain your sanity
GO TEAM FLAVOR!
Stadium food goes gourmet
Champions on the Rise
Speed demon
C O M PA N I O N
MY ROLLER COASTER LOVE AFFAIR
( COVER ) PORTRAIT BY
TRYSTIN MITCHELL
2 | DESERT
Learning to love the Vdara death ray By Krista Diamond
DEPARTMENTS
CHAMPIONS ON THE RISE
( EXTRAS )
Events, gatherings, and performances to ring in spring
APRIL/MAY 2022
ZAPPED
The Vdara death ray’s warning
Sabin Orr
A A L I YA H G AY L E S : S A B I N O R R ; C AT C H B A L L : L I N D A K A S I A N ; M G M G R A N D A DV E N T U R E S : A L A M Y
An anti-consumerist ethos flourishes in this outdoor gear shop By Heidi Kyser
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VISIT THESMITHCENTER.COM TO SEE THE FULL LINEUP 702.749.2000 | TTY: 800.326.6868 or dial 711 | Group Inquiries: 702.749.2348 | 361 Symphony Park Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89106
4
Jerry’s Note
Mark Vogelzang Favian Perez EDITOR Andrew Kiraly ART DIRECTOR Christopher Smith DEPUTY EDITOR Heidi Kyser SENIOR DESIGNER Scott Lien PUBLISHER
W
SENIOR DIRECTOR OF REVENUE
hat a fantastic, fascinating, epic, sometimes scary, and ultimately joyful journey the past two and a half years has been. As I step down as president and CEO, I want to reflect on the journey we’ve been on together and how enthusiastic I am about the future of Nevada Public Radio. In 2019, the Nevada Public Radio board of directors asked me to help stabilize the organization and work with the team here to pull ourselves out of a grave financial crisis. After that crisis came another, and our organization was faced with the dire impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. But, despite those challenges, together we confronted an uncertain future, forged ahead, and made Nevada Public Radio a stronger and healthier organization. The last 30 months have brought transformational changes. As an organization, we engaged these world-shaking changes by investing in content to help give readers and listeners context and clarity. We responded to the racial turmoil enveloping our country by taking a five-part deep dive into “Race and Racism in Nevada” on KNPR’s State of Nevada, while in July 2020 Desert Companion held an enlightening virtual roundtable on racial justice, “Every Voice: Race, Protest, and Power in Las Vegas,” which the magazine subsequently published as a print feature as well. Also on KNPR, we debuted our first podcast series, “Native Nevada,” telling the stories of Nevada’s 27 Indigenous tribes, bands, and colonies. We partnered with the Mountain West News Bureau to bring more voices and more diversity in covering the issues that matter to Nevadans and the greater Mountain West region. We wrote, produced, and performed two live radio theater productions and, more recently, we debuted a second podcast series, “Exit Spring Mountain,” which explores and shares stories by and for the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. For its part, Desert Companion has continued publishing award-winning journalism, highlighting the very best of Las Vegas and the surrounding communities, while introducing our weekly email newsletter, Fifth Street. As I end my tenure as Nevada Public Radio’s President and CEO, I am deeply gratified to have been able to work alongside this amazing team to realize a collective vision for the organization. And it was only made possible by member support, volunteers, corporate sponsors, and our community partners. You are the fuel that keeps the vitality of public media in Nevada thriving. Thank you, Jerry Nadal
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WEB ADMINISTRATOR
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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Jennifer Battisti, Ganny Belloni, Krista Diamond, Jason Harris, Kristen Kidman, Greg Blake Miller, Mike Prevatt, Gabriela Rodriguez, Kris Saknussemm, Beth Schwartz, Paul Szydelko, Mike Weatherford
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Dom McKenzie, Sabin Orr CONTACT
Andrew Kiraly, (702) 259-7856; andrew@desertcompanion.com
EDITORIAL:
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Favian Perez (702) 259-7813; favian@desertcompanion.com
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Desert Companion is published bimonthly (woot!) by Nevada Public Radio, 1289 S. Torrey Pines Dr., Las Vegas, NV 89146. It is available by subscription at desertcompanion.vegas, or as part of Nevada Public Radio membership. It is also distributed free at select locations in the Las Vegas Valley. All photos, artwork and ad designs printed are the sole property of Desert Companion and may not be duplicated or reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. The views of Desert Companion contributing writers are not necessarily the views of Desert Companion or Nevada Public Radio. Contact us for back issues, which are available for purchase for $7.95.
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Discovering new places to be active in Southern Nevada just got easier! Download the Neon to Nature app to find walking and biking trails in your neighborhood. The app features trail listings that include trail information, photos, maps, and amenities. With over one thousand miles of trails for walking and biking, the Neon to Nature app can help your family have fun outside and be more active.
Made possible with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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CONTRIBUTORS
MOVE IT T
he start of 2022 was a bit of a throwback for me. I was ducking the omicron wave, staying at home, huddling close to the deadening light of my TV and its endless sluice of distractions. Lame, boring, enervating, 2020-redux vibes, stewing in privileged resentment, serious couchlock, etc. I confess that I originally flipped to the 2022 Olympics in Beijing out of some gloomily giddy voyeuristic impulse because I’d heard the ambience was, oooh, “dystopian,” with those massive concrete silos (eagerly misread as components of a nuclear power plant) framing the ski jump serving as a definitive metaphor for the heedless industrial brutality of globalism or something. Welp! Came for a smug laugh, stayed for the actual Olympics. I got emo as hell as, whoa, to my own surprise, I was transfixed, instead, by the fundamental spiritual pith of the games: Bodies devoting themselves with an almost scientific discipline to pure expressions of excellence, hinting at the possibilities of human achievement. I know, stunningly obvious to any sports fan, but this late-stage realization tasted hella epiphanic and truthy to me. Point is, I hope our spring sports, leisure, and outdoors issue tunes you into that mode amid darkening times — appreciating the enduring pleasures of travel, of exploration, of wonder, of reveling in the body’s powers and possibilities. For a dose of that, flip anywhere, whether it’s to our profiles of promising young athletes in Champions on the Rise, our feature on family road trips, our spring sports preview, or our more ruminative pieces on theme parks and air travel. In a world divided a thousand ways, one durable truth we have in common is the basic fact of our bodies — and their need to move, seek, and aspire. Andrew Kiraly editor
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GREG BLAKE MILLER teaches literary nonfiction and media studies at UNLV and is the director of Olympian Creative Coaching. A recipient of the Nevada Press Association’s Outstanding Journalist award, he was also a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2019 Fiction Open. In better days, Miller was a staff writer for Russia’s Moscow Times, and he is currently completing a novel set in the Soviet 1960s. He blogs at gregblakemiller.org. JENNIFER BATTISTI is a lifelong Nevadan and poet whose work has appeared in Witness, Slant, 300 Days of Sun, and numerous other publications. She is the author of the 2018 chapbook Echo Bay and the 2021 experimental memoir Off Boulder Highway. Jennifer also serves as the coordinator and a participating Teaching Artist for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County.
A N D R E W K I R A LY : C H R I S T O P H E R S M I T H
Editor’s Note
When she’s not using her wily moves to score points on the catchball court, BETH SCHWARTZ can be found indulging in the finest epicurean pursuits Las Vegas has to offer. Beth has helmed the editorial pages of lifestyle magazines, including elevate NV and Luxury Las Vegas, in Southern Nevada for almost 20 years. While Beth has received many accolades for writing, she most treasures being awarded Best Local Column by the Nevada Press Association in 2021.
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YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S IN-STORE FOR YOU! ASTONISHING. UNPREDICTABLE. MIND-BENDING. Omega Mart is an immersive interactive experience from groundbreaking art collective, Meow Wolf. Featuring jaw-dropping work from international and local artists, Omega Mart sends participants of all ages on a journey through surreal worlds and immersive storytelling. Discover secret portals or simply soak up the innovative art as you venture beyond an extraordinary supermarket into parts unknown.
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J A D E H E W I T T /A T H L E T E S U N L I M I T E D
Can Athletes Unlimited succeed with its next-gen approach to professional women’s sports? BY
L
Ganny Belloni
as Vegas is a basketball town. Yes, the Raiders have played their first two seasons at Allegiant Stadium, and the Golden Knights have been lighting up T-Mobile for a few years now. Even so, you can’t discount the grassroots impact that basketball has managed to make on this city. Thirty years of NCAA championships, AAU tournaments, and NBA Summer League action have given this town an insatiable appetite for the bouncing orange ball, whetted by four seasons of the Las Vegas Aces. Alas,
since the 2007 NBA All Star Game at Thomas & Mack Center, Vegas has been ghosted by NBA franchises, and Running Rebels fans have been forced to endure losing seasons in a half-empty arena. Regardless, the love of the game lingers on, and like many of Las Vegas’ basketball-crazed netizens, I’ve searched far and wide for basketball that lives up to the city’s larger-than-life reputation. Enter Athletes Unlimited, the women’s professional basketball league that throws the middle finger up to everything we thought we knew about the game. Teams. What teams? Coaches? Naw fam, don’t need ’em. There’s nothing quite like what they put together at Athletes Unlimited Arena, off Sunset, just south of the airport. The moment you step inside, you realize that everything — from the 40-foot LCD monitor projecting player stats and highlights, to collaborations with sports media companies such as Overtime and House of Highlights — is purposefully designed and packaged for social media consumption. More video game than basketball league, players “draft” their own teams and are encouraged to play for stats rather than wins — creating an entirely different style of A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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other media outlets and eventually create a viewership base that can be monetized through things like sponsorship and advertising.” Looking at what Athletes Unlimited has put together, it’s not hard to believe it has potential. The player-driven business model, in which athletes partner with the league at every step of the decision-making process, is something that has yet to be implemented in legacy leagues like the NFL and NBA. Having athletes call the shots removes the bureaucratic BS that hampers leagues like the NBA and NFL (you won’t see players in AU getting fined for wearing custom shoes or the wrong headbands). This leaves players and the league room to experiment with ideas that wouldn’t gain traction under a traditional ownership model. Ideas like their charity partnership program, where players play for charities of their choice throughout the season. At the end of the season, the league says, it will pitch in an additional 50 percent of the players’ bonuses to nonprofits — allowing players to play for something greater than themselves. From a purely financial perspective, what Athletes Unlimited is putting forward seems like a gamble. Their gameplay is avant-garde, and their business model is untested; even as a lifelong basketball fan, I needed about 20 minutes to figure out exactly what was going on. Nevertheless, women’s basketball is attracting money — the WNBA recently got a $75 million investment by a who’s-who of financial backers, which included everyone from corporate big wigs such as Michael Dell to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And if there’s any place where something like this can succeed it’s Las Vegas, a city that rewards gamblers and risk-takers. It’s part of our ethos: Don’t come with the heat, don’t go big? Then go home. Athletes Unlimited brought the heat, but only time can tell if the league will cash out on its risk. Even if it doesn’t, the future of sports may be heading in their direction. ✦
SPORTS
NFL – LAS VEGAS RAIDERS
The latest: The Raiders have a new head coach, Josh McDaniels, and a new GM, Dave Ziegler. What’s next? Will new management look to put their own personnel in place or keep the current roster intact and fill areas of need, such as their run defense? Perhaps more importantly, can they put off-field problems behind them and tap into their new, highly energized fan base in Las Vegas, to have a better 2022-’23 season? The buzz: The draft — scheduled here, April 28-30 — will give a good idea of what McDaniels and Ziegler have in mind for the team going forward. We’ll also find out who, among the available receivers, could replace Henry Ruggs. And also … Late February brought the announcement that the Raiders will play the Jacksonville Jaguars in the Hall of Fame game, August 4, to kick off the preseason.
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Game On
Spring brings plenty to watch in pro sports — both on and off the field. Here’s your cheat sheet to the season BY H E I D I KYS E R A N D CHRISTOPHER SMITH
NHL – VEGAS GOLDEN KNIGHTS
The latest: Late in the 2021-’22 season, the Golden Knights playoffs prospects — which seemed like a lock pre-Olympics — are up in the air. As of press time, they were struggling and in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time. What’s next? The fight for the playoffs, running May-June. The buzz: The Golden Knights have battled
through more adversity — injuries, illnesses, COVID, salary cap problems — than in years past and hung on. They’ve played much of the year with young players called up from the American Hockey League, who are contributing to the team. But with several key players on long-term injured reserve, including forward Mark Stone, the roster has been a carousel for most of the season. The March 21 trade deadline (coinciding with our press date) will determine who’s on the ice heading into the playoffs — if the team makes it that far. And also … Local AHL team the Henderson Silver Knights are moving to their new home, Dollar Loan Center, at the beginning of April. W N B A – L A S V E G A S AC E S
The latest: The Aces have a new head coach, Becky Hammon, and re-signed league star
V E G A S G O L D E N K N I G H T S : A P P H O T O ; LV L I G H T S : C O U R T E S Y LV L I G H T S F C ; A V I A T O R S : S T E V E S P A T A F O R E
basketball: one that’s free-form, faster-paced, and more creative than the traditional college and professional game. “You don’t have a coach screaming at you and any of those (negative) factors that usually come to play in a basketball game,” says former Duke star and AU athlete Lexie Brown. “Everyone out here plays so free, and it’s been so much fun. It’s just a vibe that I’ve never experienced in any basketball situation that I’ve ever been in my life.” That’s exactly the type of experience New York City Football Club president and Athletes Unlimited founder Jon Patricof envisioned when he and venture capitalist Jonathan Soros (George’s son) teamed up to launch Athletes Unlimited in 2020 — a multisport corporation that operates women’s professional softball, volleyball, lacrosse, and basketball leagues. AU aims to take advantage of two trends in sports fandom: The move toward following individual players rather than teams and the rise of sports-obsessed female consumers — two trends that, according to Patricof, won’t be slowing down anytime soon. “I think there’s a big opportunity ahead of us,” he says. “Women’s pro sports is the largest untapped opportunity in the professional sports market. I believe that there’s tremendous fandom and incredible talent, and I believe we’re going to see increasing growth.” Seeing some of the best women’s basketball players in the world play in front of a live DJ is captivating. It made me wonder why the sport hasn’t taken off yet. Rick Burton, professor of sport management at Syracuse University and the ex-marketing officer for the United States Olympic Committee, believes the answer is simple: time. “The reason why men’s leagues have achieved so much success is because they have existed for a lot longer and they’ve had the benefit of a real symbiotic relationship with the media,” Burton says. “The media hasn’t gravitated toward women’s sports until very recently. Once they get to a critical mass, they’ll be able to will up interest from
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
and de facto team leader A’ja Wilson. What’s next? Regular season starts May 6. Until then, mark your calendar for the draft, April 11. Former Aces Liz Cambage and Angel McCoughtry signed elsewhere during free agency. Without them, how will the team perform under their new coach? What type of player will Hammon be looking for? And what impact will she have on the team? And also … There was some social media grumbling in January about Hammon’s million-dollar salary being so much higher than the players’ compensation. In early February, Swish Appeal reported that Aces owner Mark Davis was ready to pay players what they’re worth. USL – LAS VEGAS LIGHTS
The latest: The Lights also have a new head coach, Enrique Duran, after the former coach ascended to the L.A. Football Club’s top coaching position. LAFC has renewed its agreement as the Lights’ MLS affiliate. What’s next? Regular season runs March 19 through October — yes, October! — 23 And also … Local officials are pushing for an MLS expansion team in Las Vegas. MLS is reported to be in talks with investors Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris on funding the team, and Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft said it was a promising deal, as everything would be privately financed. The MLS commissioner said in December that Vegas was a frontrunner for the league’s next new team. But, you know, we’ve heard this before ...
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M I L B – L A S V E G A S AV I AT O R S
The latest: Preseason games started in March, with players “auditioning ” for the big show. Big League Weekend, featuring two major league teams, was cancelled because of the lockout, which ended M a r c h 1 0. W h a t ’s next? Opening Night is April 5. The team added six dates to its schedule for a total of 150 games this year. And also … The Aviators will be one of the minor-league teams testing robotic umpires at home plate this season before they (potentially) move on to MLB. ✦
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athletes who get together on a weekly basis and talk about PTSD and other struggles that they’re going through — and asked the veterans what they thought about the kneeling.
3 (SPORTS) QUESTIONS FOR
AMBER DIXON
Boxing and MMA are your favorite sports overall, but how about team sports? Which one did you enjoy covering the most? Football, but we didn’t have the Raiders until just two years ago. We have UNLV football, but it’s difficult to cover a losing team. You don’t feel like the public is all that interested, and then it gets more into, “Who’s the coach, and should they be fired?” and “Who’s the athletic director, and should they be fired?” But football would be my favorite.
Host of Vegas PBS’s Nevada Week and former KSNV News 3 sports anchor and reporter BY H E I D I KYS E R
Will there be more sports on Nevada Week now that you’re at the helm? Yes, but in a different way … applying my news experience to sports. For example, the regional (Edward R.) Murrow Award that I won was for a story about whether kneeling during the National Anthem offended military veterans, which was one of the takes on that. I went to Xtreme Couture MMA here in Las Vegas — which has a group of veterans and ex-professional
T
he peppy beat of Cyndi Lauper declaring that girls just wanna have fun is bouncing off the wood floors of the gymnasium’s basketball court. Several middle-aged women wearing yoga pants and T-shirts are running laps around the perimeter of the court while another group is doing lunges. Others are midcourt stringing up a volleyball net. With thick black kneepads in place, the pony-tailed women look ready for battle. Their fingers are wound with black athletic tape and ankles secured in tightly bound braces. It’s my biweekly rendezvous with a group of women I would never have met — even though they all live in my neighborhood — had I not started playing an obscure sport, called catchball. Initially, I demurred when a coworker invited me to play. First, because I had never heard of the sport. Second, I didn’t think my athletic talents, which included stints with soccer and track, would lend themselves to catchball, whatever it was. Based on its name, it clearly required the deft use of appendages that I had not used in my past athletic endeavors. I was finally persuaded after a promise that if I would try it once and didn’t like
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Do you think we’ll actually get a Major League Soccer team … this time? The (Las Vegas) Lights have a tremendous fan base that shows up week in and week out. And Brett Lashbrook (owner and CEO) did a really good job harnessing that market, knowing who he was appealing to. I think there’s a good chance, but it always comes down to the funding, and how many times has Las Vegas gone through, “This team’s gonna come, and this stadium’s gonna be built”? We’ve been hearing that for a long time. But if I had to put a percentage on it, I’d say 65 percent. No timeline, though. ✦
Gift of Grab COMMUNITY
How I found friendship through an Israeli game for middle-aged women BY
Beth Schwartz
it, I never had to return. So, one spring afternoon I headed to the gym to give catchball a try. I vividly remember the thrill of my first catch. It was a rainbow of a throw that soared high overhead, closer to the ceiling than the net. As the ball sailed toward me, my adrenaline surged, and I quickly positioned myself for it to land easily in my hands. In that moment of sheer exhilaration, it felt like I had been playing catchball my entire life. Six years later, the exhilaration has not abated. When people ask me about it, I offer
an elevator pitch: Catchball is volleyball for the middle-aged. Originating in Israel, this sport also has six players on each side of the court, a net, and a rotation after each play. The only difference is, players don’t clasp their fingers together to bump the ball using the inside of their wrists. Instead, indicative of the name, they catch it. Players still aggressively spike, slide, dive, and perform acrobatic catches worthy of Stretch Armstrong but it’s a kinder, gentler athletic endeavor for the less spry, less coordinated, and less youthful. C U LT U R E C L U B FINISHED WITH STRETCHING and hanging the net, we assemble on the court to warm up our arms with some practice serves as Boy George coos that every day is like survival. When I started playing catchball, the sport was very new to the United States, so there was only a handful of players in Southern Nevada. Because of its origins, our team, called the Vegas Royals, like most U.S. teams, comprises mostly Israeli Americans. As the years have passed, we’ve added to our team and, not by design, our ethnic diversity. A 5-foot-10 blond Ukrainian named Pola, who looks like she just stepped off the set of Rocky
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
customs I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced. They’ve embraced parts of my culture too. They love filling the gym with American ’80s music to pump up our evening practices. WA L K I N G O N S U N S H I N E WE FINISH OUR warmup and divide ourselves
into two six-person teams as Katrina and the Waves sassily sing about walking on sunshine. When COVID -19 began spreading in March 2020, we took a few months off, mostly because the private school gym where we played had closed. That summer, we resumed playing in the hope of bringing some normalcy back to our pandemic-driven lives. We bought a few nets and started playing in the evenings under the lights of local parks or in the bright sunshine of Sunday mornings. Sometimes when practice was over, we would spread out a blanket and drink wine, eat snacks, and catch up with one another. With the pandemic waning, the Las Vegas Royals are back in the gym preparing for the sixth Annual Catchball Games. Las Vegas has been the host city for the annual tournament several times, but this year the team will travel to San Antonio to bring the Vegas glitz. We wear black jerseys with our team’s name emblazoned in gold glitter and topped with a crown of rhinestones. As Survivor is heralding the thrill of the fight in Eye of the Tiger, I offer a battle cry of Yalla!, Arabic for “Let’s go!” and use the full momentum of my body to send the opening serve slicing just above the net. And another night of camaraderie — that’s about a lot more than catching a ball — begins. ✦
C AT C H B A L L : L I N D A K A S I A N
IV, is one of our highest scorers. She has an unstoppable spike that would make Ivan Drago proud. A French-braided Estonian spitfire named Irina has the supernatural ability to be all over the court and catch every ball without fail. Because English is not most of my teammates’ first language, they tend to default to their native tongues. When play gets heated, the number of languages flying around the court is mind-boggling. Despite my last name, I do not speak Hebrew, nor am I Jewish, although I have picked up a few words. I’ve heard Yofi, Hebrew for “Way to go,” shouted so often, it now regularly rolls off my tongue. But mostly I’m a clueless bystander to the banter. While there may be a language barrier, there has never been a human one. There’s always a warm welcome as soon as I enter the gym for practice. My teammates give hugs and show genuine interest about what’s going on in my life. These women have seen me through personal tragedy, broken relationships, and job changes. And I’ve seen them through the same — along with atrocities in their countries, such as last year’s Israel-Gaza violence and the current war in Ukraine. At the practice following Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, my teammates, one by one, made their way over to our ferocious Pola, whose mother and sister live in Ukraine, to wrap her in a hug and offer support for her homeland. Same goes for the culture. Because many of the women who play catchball practice Judaism, we hold a shabbat dinner with challah, poems, and prayers to kick off our annual tournaments. This has exposed me to
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Rising Suns
Mapping the current solar boom in Southern Nevada BY
Heidi Kyser
W
ith solar facilities currently generating 4,500 megawatts in Nevada, we rank sixth in the U.S. in terms of capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. And yet, only a fraction of land with high solar potential has been developed, and President Joe Biden is pushing for 25 gigawatts of renewable energy countrywide by 2025. The SEIA estimates Nevada’s solar industry will double in size over the next five years — in some cases, opponents say, eating up thousands of acres of natural habitat for sensitive species. Here’s a map of existing and proposed industrial-scale solar projects in the southern part of the state.
MOAPA VALLEY
and points northeast 2,389 mw current capacity In development: 950 mw Under construction: 990 mw Operating: 499 mw
1 terawatt
The solar potential of U.S. rooftops
190 Avg. number of U.S. homes currently powered by 1 mw of solar
10.7 Number of mw hours of electricity used yearly by the average U.S. home
LAS VEGAS / HENDERSON (non-residential installations) Operating: 48 mw
PAHRUMP VALLEYAMARGOSA VALLEY and points west
3,919 mw current capacity In development: 3,300 mw Under construction: 500 mw Operating: 119 mw
8,053
52 mw (Jean)
Number of homes in Boulder City
37 mw (Primm)
BOULDER CITYELDORADO VALLEY
and points south
2,083 mw current capacity In development: 498 mw Under construction: 180 mw Operating: 1,405 mw Sources: Basin and Range Watch, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NV Energy, Solar Energy Industries Association, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Energy Information Administration
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32 No. of acres of solar panels needed to power 1,000 homes
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Thrill Responsibly BUSINESS
Peaks & Pedals founder Holly Priest, an ‘anti-consumer retailer,’ is the new conscience of outdoor recreation BY
Heidi Kyser
I
really, really want the Salomon Out Day 20+4 backpack at Peaks & Pedals Gear Exchange. This day pack retails new for $140, and the like-new one here is selling for only 30 bucks. It’s my size. And it’s the pretty, dark-teal Mediterranean color. But, I think, half the damn chest strap is missing! At the checkout, as I pay for a top and pair of running shoes, the store’s owner, Holly Priest, asks if I found everything I wanted, and I tell her about the pack. “It’s not broken,” she immediately replies. “I don’t sell broken gear.” Priest fetches the pack from the rack, lifts a flap on the shoulder strap concealing a small plastic rail, and shows me how to clip the one-piece chest strap onto it. Voila! A
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perfectly intact, like-new pack. Not satisfied with this victory, she then has me put it on to check the fit. Her brow furrows. It’s sitting too high on my shoulders, tight around the waist. With my permission, she pulls on tabs, shimmies the hip belt, and shifts the bag into place. I leave the store 15 minutes later with not only a high-quality day pack, but also a personal fitting. Such attention to detail can be seen everywhere at Peaks & Pedals, which opened last October in a strip mall on Craig Road near I-95. The store is arranged (and smells) more like a boutique designer store than a thrift shop. Everything is clean and tagged and placed on a shelf or rack in its respective section: biking, camping, hiking, paddling, or snow sports — plus general recreational
clothing. Inventory is cataloged and updated on Peaks & Pedals’ website, where items can be bought and held for pick-up or ordered for delivery. “I was initially drawn to Holly’s intelligence,” Priest’s life partner, Ryan Meier, says. “She’s a very intelligent woman, and I like that. But her creative side has come out in the store. … You see that when you walk in. It doesn’t look like a normal consignment store. Her store is beautifully set up.” The interior is painted forest green and sandstone red. One wall of the clothing and footwear room in the back bears a mountain mural reflecting the company’s logo. For trying on shoes, there’s a comfy goldenrod couch that Priest brought in when she downsized from her Blue Diamond rental house to her cousin’s spare bedroom, one of many life changes heralded by the business’s launch. That’s the most interesting part of Peaks & Pedals — how it came to be. Born and raised in Northern Nevada to an outdoorsy family, Priest left college with a history degree and entered the dismal job market of the Great Recession. Convinced by her attorney-filled family that it was the right move, she came to Las Vegas to go to UNLV’s Boyd School of Law. She graduated with honors, clerked for District Court Judge Rob Bare, and went into a career as a commercial litigator. “Real estate was my bailiwick,” Priest says. “I was good at big cases, the ‘Where in the title did it all go wrong?’ cases.” And then, as we now say, COVID hit, and everything changed. Practicing law alone from her house, Priest started to have some mental health issues. She realized it was the people, her co-workers and clients, that she loved about her job, not the work itself. “This sounds silly, but law is so adversarial,” she says. “It wears you down, getting emails from opposing counsel, the sniping that happens, having to be on the defensive all the time.” An idea Priest had sublimated began to bubble to the surface. While traveling around the West, she’d shopped in many used outdoor clothing and equipment stores — Wonderland Gear Exchange in Seattle; Durango Outdoor Exchange in Colorado; Gear Hut in Reno; Snow, Mountain, River in Flagstaff. Why, she wondered, wasn’t PHOTOGRAPHY
Christopher Smith
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
there such a place in Las Vegas? During grad school, she’d had amazing adventures, coming to cherish the valley as a place where you could mountain bike all year, go hiking in the morning, and swimming at Lake Mead in the afternoon. There had to be a market for used recreational goods. Sitting on the porch of Cottonwood Station restaurant in Blue Diamond with a close mountain biker friend, she brought up the idea. By the end of dinner, they had a name and logo. She started collecting merchandise at thrift stores and yard sales. “Eventually, it flipped to, Wow! This is actually happening,” Priest says. She attended the Outdoor Retailer conference, learning about industry trends (competition from Amazon, and the pandemic explosion of outdoor recreation). She hired her friend and former McGhie’s Ski, Bike, and Board technician Nick Dru as her manager. She got advice from owners of the shops she’d visited in other cities. She shopped for a point-of-sale system that would do everything — consignment, delivery, online sales. With her legal background, normally daunting tasks such as setting up an LLC and negotiating a lease, were a piece of cake. Still, launching a unique business in an untested market from the ground up is a lot of work. With her background, Priest could have opted for many easier second careers. Why go to all this trouble? “I’m passionate about this,” she says. By “this” she means building community in outdoor recreation, teaching responsible outdoors behavior, and — perhaps most important — promoting sustainability. Peaks & Pedals uses paper tags attached to merchandise with twine. They don’t give receipts or bags unless asked (and then, it’s a reused paper bag). They use post-consumer recycled products in the lavatory and repurpose boxes to ship products. And a portion of proceeds from donated items goes to four outdoor-oriented nonprofits. One is Get Outdoors Nevada, which appreciates Peaks & Pedals’ commitment to community engagement. “They’ve participated in a couple of our cleanup events,” Get Outdoors Nevada Executive Director Rachel Bergren says. “At the heart of it, our missions are aligned. We both want to encourage, support, and equip folks to get outside and enjoy all Nevada has to offer in the outdoors. … Outdoor gear can be expensive and a barrier to that. The idea of having a business that’s providing gear at a reduced cost to regular retail, as well as upcycling, is cool from a
sustainability perspective.” Cool, yes. But … profitable? Priest says she’s not worried. She’s doing something she loves, and it’s much less stressful than practicing law. She’d like to have a bit bigger store eventually, maybe a second one in Henderson.
“But,” she adds, “I don’t have grandiose goals. I want to make a simple living. I want the store to be around in 25 years. And the lake (Mead). I want a place where my friends drop by at the end of the day and have a beer. If I wanted to make a lot of money, I would’ve kept doing law.” ✦
Gentle Cycle OPEN TOPIC
E-bikes are a big buzz on the trails and in bike shops. But is it really cycling? And does it matter? BY
Mike Weatherford
I
’ve pedaled all 34 grueling miles of the River Mountains Loop Trail — just not all at once. The trail’s not flat, and it’s not easy. I’m content to ride my bike on sections of it, in six- to 10-mile round trips. Completing the trail in one epic excursion is an uncommon feat of truly dedicated cyclists. That used to be the case, anyway. Nowadays, no matter what part of the trail I’m grinding out, I’m prepared for a buzzing noise and a breezy whoosh on my sweaty skin as another rider blows by. Or, if they’re coming at me, a direct confrontation with the friendly wave of a happy senior. E-bikes. Cheaters. Slackers. Schluffers. I hate ’em. I want one. It’s not fun getting lapped by people on Social Security. Electronically assisted bikes have tamed the trail that I one day hoped to be in just the right shape for. Now, just about anyone can knock out the loop. To choke back my jealousy and bitterness, I think of Pat Benke and her riding group, the Older Boulder Biker Babes. You will know them by their matching club T-shirts. They range in age from 65 to 77. A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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all booked in advance. E-bikes have exploded in popularity in the last five years for a few key reasons. The bikes got cheaper and lighter, and run longer on a battery charge. Padfield’s first fleet of e-bikes was six years old when he sold and replaced them. “The highest mileage on one was only 1,300 miles,” he says. His new fleet is just over one year old, “and every single one has over 2,000 miles on it right now.” There’s an important distinction among e-bikes. Padfield and Horack’s shops only rent “pedal-assist” bikes, versus the “throttle bikes” which you can gun like a motorcycle without pedaling. “‘That’s a scooter, or a moped,” Horack says. “That’s not what we believe is riding a bicycle.” Is the day coming when the batteries get so good, the loop trail will be like a theme park ride, with faux motorcycles racing in laps, ignoring the 20 mph speed limit? “That’s
ABOUT THE TRAIL
Completed in 2012, the River Mountains Loop Trail is about 34 miles long and surrounds the River Mountains, connecting Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Hoover Dam, Henderson, Boulder City and the rest of the Las Vegas Valley. The trail’s official starting point is behind the Railroad Pass Casino’s convenience store. There’s a parking lot for cyclists on a hillside area just south of the store. Other places to access the trail: • Park near the Nevada State Veterans Home in Boulder City, or share parking with mountain bikers in nearby Bootleg Canyon Park. • The Equestrian Park trailhead in Henderson, at the intersection of Equestrian and Foothills Drives.
• A parking lot on the south side of East Lake Mead Parkway, past the Lake Las Vegas turnoff and just before the fee station entry to Lake Mead National Recreation Area. A spur trail connects to the loop. Be advised this entry point will plug you into the loop’s hilliest, roughest terrain in either direction before you see much flat ground. • The parking lot for the Historic Railroad Trail near the Boulder City fee station for the lake — if you can get a spot, given that trail’s popularity. (If you can’t, the Visitor Center is just up a hill from it). Cyclists don’t have to pay the park’s entry fee. For more information, visit rivermountainstrail.org.
E-BIKE: CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Benke and her husband bought standard bikes when they first moved to Boulder City — and those bikes sat in the garage for 20 years. But now, the Biker Babes keep their Tuesdays clear for weekly e-bike excursions, often taking the loop trail to Lake Las Vegas for lunch. “We can go as far as we want, and when we do see a hill we’re not afraid of it,” Benke says. “We’ve populated the trail.” E-bikes “basically brought the trail to the masses that couldn’t do it before,” says Ron Floth, an avid cyclist and longtime advocate for the trail; he used to chair the River Mountains Trail Partnership Advisory Council. “(The trail) was only for the hardiest of cyclists,” he says. “Even if you’re in really good shape, it would still take you three or three-and-a-half hours to get around it. And at the end of that ride, you’d better not plan anything for the rest of your day because you’re gonna be on the couch with sore legs.” Two bicycle stores near the trail say e-bikes have transformed their business. “E-bikes have taken over our sales,” says Kurt Horack of All Mountain Cyclery in Boulder City; e-bikes account for about 65 percent of the bikes that roll out the door. His rentals are almost exclusively e-bikes; standard pedal-power bikes rent out maybe five or six times a year now. “If you can rent race cars instead of pickup trucks, why wouldn’t you?” Horack says. At the opposite end of the trail, Darryn Padfield owns River Mountain Bike Shop off Lake Mead Parkway near Lake Las Vegas. “Eighty percent of my business are (e-bike) rentals, because it evens the playing level,” Padfield says. It used to be that a group of four people would show up with different levels of stamina. “Now you’re all starting on equal terms. That’s how it’s changed the confidence of getting people onto the trail.” His store has 18 e-bikes for rent, with 16 new ones on back-order. On a temperate weekend, they’re
something we keep an eye on,” says Paul Grube, the trail advisory council’s current chair. But for now, more of the council’s job is still to “get the word out there that there is a trail,” Grube says, “because believe it or not, even people who live a half a mile away have never even heard of it before.” That’s bound to change as e-bikes make the trail much more accessible and popular, a prospect that might rankle traditionally low-tech trail users not familiar with the telltale buzz of a group of e-bikes approaching. “Let’s not be angry, let’s educate,” says Pat Treichel of Ghost Bikes Las Vegas, a bike safety awareness group known for placing white bicycles as memorials at the sites of cyclist fatalities. “There’s a little responsibility: ‘Hey, you’re on an e-bike. The guy you’re coming up on doesn’t know that.’ I think a lot of it’s just education.” Treichel has heard the grumbling from cycling purists who don’t count e-bikes in their tribe, and he has a couple standard rebuttals. One is simply, “Choose your battle. If you have e-bikes and regular bikes on the same trail, yeah, somebody might run into somebody or tip over or whatever. But that sure as heck beats putting them out into traffic with a car, where it’s not gonna be an even fight. They should have a much easier time co-existing than a bicycle of any kind does with a car.” The other response is more long-range. “The more people we can get to throw their leg over a bicycle and ride it, the more voters, taxpayers, and road users are going to have a different understanding of cycling as a whole,” Treichel says. “And we’re going to get more infrastructure (such as) trails. A lot of people really resent or are uncomfortable
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with change. But you’re not going to get anywhere resisting it. You’re better learning to live with it or how to adapt.” I caved. With our daughter home for college break, we rented e-bikes for a family excursion on a brisk, sunny January day. It was a bit of an experiment. Would the e-bikes neutralize the 40-year age span of our trio? I wondered most about my wife, who prefers swimming and hiking over cycling. But we were barely past Taco Bell on the way to the trail when she whooshed by me shouting, “This is freaking fantastic!” The Specialized Turbo Comos have three notches of power-assist. It was wise to use them sparingly (especially the highest-power level, with its optional chants of “Tur-bo! Tur-bo!”) to save juice for the last punishing climb from the Historic Railroad Tunnel Trail parking lot through Boulder City. We all finished with our battery grid on its last bar, even if my wife’s was the only one flashing a warning that she would soon be riding a regular bike. And if it helps with the guilt: Riding the 75-pound bikes with no power assist makes them harder to pedal than even my slowest “comfort bike.” We made the loop in a little more than three hours, thanks to a whip-cracking daughter worried about a dental appointment, who wouldn’t let us stop except for quick sips of water and nibbles of peanut-butter sandwich. Turned out it was a real ride after all — just longer than most. We were all ready for it to be over, saddle sore and feeling like, well, like we had an actual workout — even though I also felt like I was a philanderer, cheating on my real bike when we sailed past the familiar sections I ride on my own. More of the time — including when we chugged up and over the Three Sisters mountain ridges — it felt like sweet revenge for past torture. Did I maybe raise a middle finger to those hills when no one was looking? I would no more admit it than I would claim to know it’s possible to goose the speedometer past 50 mph on the downside of the Sisters. Don’t want to encourage what’s likely to become an actual problem as e-bikes get cheaper and the trail more crowded. I still want to someday ride the whole trail on my old-fashioned bike. I’m just feeling more like a lazy schluffer about it now. ✦
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PROFILE
Shredding After Dark When Justin Bishop went blind, his skateboarding career’s second act took on a new clarity BY
Jason Harris
J
ustin Bishop’s skate gear goes well beyond the usual stuff like his board, pads, and shoes. “My skate backpack is just insane,” he says. “It has so many different tools to help me get whatever trick I want.” Tools such as “beeper boxes” that alert him to curbs and ramp edges, and a cane with a ball-bearing tip. “That way, my cane is constantly touching the ground,” the native Las Vegan explains. “When you’re skateboarding, even a millisecond that you lose contact with the ground, you don’t know what’s in front of you.” Such specialized tools are indispensable to the 35-year-old skateboarder, who was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at age 8, a degenerative condition that eventually causes blindness. But Bishop’s most indispensable tool is also the most intangible: His determination to continue skateboarding after he became fully sightless when he was 25. Today you can catch videos of him shredding at parks and on ramps on videos from The New Yorker and Thrasher Magazine — not to mention inspiring other kids with disabilities to pursue the growing sport of adaptive skateboarding. But it was not an easy ride. When Bishop’s vision went away, it went fast and hit him hard. “I stopped skating. I stopped everything,” he recalls. He now considers it almost advantageous that his sight went as quickly as it did. “It was almost like all my usable sight was gone within a week. I finally got to grieve for what I lost and hit depression.” For the next few years, Bishop focused on becoming independent again. He learned how to read Braille, how to use VoiceOver screenreaders to stay connected with technology, and he worked on orientation and mobility training. But it seemed that skateboarding was a thing of the past for the athlete who had garnered his first pro sponsorships as a teenager. Not only that, he couldn’t find any job that would hire him. Bishop vented his frustrations to his friend, Andrew Devitt, the founder of Sport-Social, a local organization that aims to develop the social and behavioral skills of special needs children through music, art, and sports. Devitt hired Bishop as a therapist to teach motor skills development through skateboarding. For the first few months, the boards often didn’t even have wheels as Bishop instructed the students on balance and stance. As the students progressed, Bishop had to as well. “It wasn’t until they PHOTOGRAPHY
Sabin Orr
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
started to have to stand on the skateboard and I had to show them how to do it. When they would stand on it, I’d feel their feet and where the placements are. That’s how it slowly got me back on the board.” Eventually, Bishop dropped in at a friend’s quarter pipe. The moment was seminal. Bishop recalls, “I dropped down, and I’m so happy. I come up to the other side and actually hang up on the other side and it slams me down to the ground. It was everything that skateboarding involves happened in that 10 seconds — success, failure, pain. I missed all of it.” Bishop came back to the sport with a vengeance. He practiced in his garage, with the doors closed. He bought a balance board to retrain his muscles inside his house. Regularly finishing in the top two of adaptive skate competitions, now a regular event on the Dew Tour, last year Bishop was the overall points leader in the field. It took him this long to get back, but he thinks finally hit a groove. Longtime friend Michael J. Herbert remembers the moment when he realized that Bishop was bound for greatness in his new career as an adaptive skateboarder. Bishop was contracted through Zappos to do a gig at The Smith Center at which the company built a half-pipe for him to perform his tricks. “That’s when I realized, ‘Holy shit. He’s not only a blind skateboarder, but he’s amazing at it,’” Herbert recalls. “Just watching him on stage with a crowd of people cheering him brought a tear to my eye.” “When you first start skateboarding, it’s a lot about recklessly hoping for the best,” Bishop says. “After you do it for long enough and things start making sense, then it’s about controlling the chaos. For the second time in my life, it’s been feeling like that. I’m actually controlling the chaos instead of recklessly hoping for the best that the trick happens. I can make it happen now. It feels great.” The world has certainly taken notice: His sponsors include Nike SB and Element, and he’s featured in a Ruffles commercial with LeBron James. He’s also been working with USA Skateboarding to get adaptive skateboarding in the Summer Paralympics in 2028, which take place in Los Angeles, where skateboarding first became huge in the 1970s and 1980s. However, Bishop doesn’t want to win the ’28 Paralympics competition. In fact, he doesn’t even want to compete. “By then, I’ll be 42, so I’ll be able to check out the youth I inspired. Hopefully they’ll be skating in it. My goal is to not be able to qualify for it. I want other blind kids to beat me out. If they can beat me out, then I did good.” ✦
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FOOD + DRINK
One of Ismaele Romano’s simple but insanely flavorful sandwiches
Simply Irresistible S TA C K AT TA C K
Five ingredients, endless flavors. That’s why Ismaele Romano of Via Focaccia is the sandwich champ BY
A
Jason Harris
world champion is in our midst. Last summer at the International Pizza Expo, Ismaele Romano won the World Sandwich Championship. “I saw the second-place finisher, and it was a really simple sandwich,” he recalls. “I said, ‘If that’s second place, who is going to be winning?’ I was surprised at the same time. When they called me, I screamed like a crazy guy.” While Romano might have been surprised, those who have tried his food were not. The Sicilian expat grew up in the small town of Lentini, learning how to cook in his parents’ kitchen, before further developing his skills throughout Italy. Romano furthered his craft PHOTOGRAPHY
Christopher Smith
not just in restaurants in his home province, but also in Tuscany, Florence, and Milan. Through it all, the theme was always the same for the chef. “In Tuscany and Florence, we focused on the meat and cheese,” he explains. “In Sicily, the ingredients are different, but wherever you were, the one thing that didn’t change was the quality of the food.” Simplicity. Respect for the product. That’s the basis of great Italian food — and why it’s so hard to perfect. It can be deceptively simple, and it is through restraint, knowledge of the ingredients, and the ability to maximize natural flavors that a master can show true A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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Chef Ismaele Romano
cooks it with onions, carrots, and celery to create a rib-sticking filling to complement the crunchy rice outside. It’s fitting the Via Focaccia sits side by side with Metro Pizza: The beloved pizza joint’s owner, John Arena, is one of the backers and creative developers of Romano’s kiosk. Arena first came across Romano when the Sicilian was working at another odd location, Contento, the Sicilian-style eatery he ran in Jerry’s Nugget. After tasting some of Romano’s cuisine, “I was blown away his talent and his execution,” Arena says. His decision to invest in Via Focaccia had less to do with profit and more to do with promoting new culinary experiments. “We’re in a unique time in Las Vegas and its culinary evolution,” Arena says. “People are doing
things that are a little bit unexpected, and there’s enough of an audience to support them. The idea was not to build Via Focaccia and make a bunch of money. The idea was to build it and bring something that hasn’t been here before.” Romano is on the same page. “The goal of this place is to make people understand what real Italian food is,” he says. “It’s really simple food.” But he does hope to eventually build on his simple vision: “A gastronomia,” he says, “where you go in and you see pasta, sandwiches, porchetta, roasted chicken, salumi, charcuterie, cheese, and pizza.” And, of course, his award-winning focaccia. ✦ Inside the Ellis Island hotel-casino, ellisislandcasino.com
Go Team Flavor FA N F O O D
Cheeseburger bao, anyone? Modern sports stadium fare has come a long way from hot dogs and beer BY
C
Jason Harris
hinatown. The Arts District. Even Water Street. Those are some of the names that pop up when you think of local foodie hotspots. But don’t forget about these: T-Mobile Arena. Allegiant Stadium. Even Las Vegas Ballpark. With the spate of pro leagues and shiny new arenas emerging in the valley in the past few years, Las Vegas has a serious case of sports fever — and, apparently, an appetite for something beyond the usual stadium fast-food experience. These days, sports venue concessions are serving up fancy sandwiches, craft cocktails, and head-turning desserts. “This is Las Vegas,” says Eric Koehler, executive chef for Levy Restaurants, which manages the menus at T-Mobile Arena, Allegiant Stadium, and Las Vegas Ballpark. “People expect other things from you.” The Vegas ethos can take some credit, but fan food has quietly been getting more bougie for years, a trend powered by factors as various as binge-worthy cooking
ISMAELE ROMANO AND GARY LAMORTE: CHRISTOPHER SMITH; TAC O S C O U R T E S Y O F L A S V E G A S B A L L PA R K
craftsmanship. Do too much and you’ve done too much. That’s the philosophy Romano brought with him when he moved to Las Vegas six years ago — and it’s what guided his way to sandwich stardom at the expo. It also helped that Romano has a deep sense memory that he frequently taps for inspiration. “In Rome, there is gorgeous porchetta,” he recalls. “You smell it on the street. I thought I could make a sandwich with porchetta and good vegetables.” Those good vegetables — “herbete” — are a mix of kale and dandelion greens. For his winning sandwich, Romano decided to incorporate the bitter blend into his dough, and what he created was a green, flavorful focaccia that was both striking and strong enough to envelope his porchetta. With two bold components, it became a matter of balance. What enhances the flavor of the meat? What fits with the homemade bread? In this case, it was classic Italian ingredients — roasted eggplant, giardiniera (pickled vegetables), and provolone cheese. It all worked in harmony to create something, well, world championship-worthy. Where does a world champion go after winning with a such a bold statement? Disney World? A global tour with his famed sandwich? The late-night talk show circuit? Or… an off-Strip, locals-friendly hotel known for its bargain steak deals, sports bar, and karaoke nights? That’s right: Ismaele Romano now makes his world-class focaccia at Ellis Island. And not in the café, the Front Yard brewpub, or the karaoke bar. Instead, his tiny kiosk sits across the hall from the Metro Pizza station. The space is even too small to prep his world champion sandwich. In the end, that’s not really important, since Romano is putting out so many other delicious items. Most of Romano’s sandwiches at Via Focaccia cap out at no more than five ingredients — all on that superb, housemade focaccia. There’s the Cotto, which features imported ham, Fontina cheese, and béchamel. The not-so-Italian Americano contains slow-roasted turkey, bacon, Vermont cheddar, and avocado garlic aioli. But what’s perhaps the best sandwich is still not even on the menu (at least not yet): Romano’s Chicken Pizzaoila is chicken cordon bleu meets chicken parmesan. The sandwich is stacked with roasted tomato spread, chicken cutlet, shaved parmigiana reggiano, prosciutto cotto, burrata cheese, and fresh oregano. Beyond the sandwiches, be sure to try the arancini — at Via Focaccia, it’s far superior to the typical fried rice ball you might expect. Instead, this is arancini di pasta with ragu del salumiere. Romano uses leftover meat, and
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
WHAT DOES A RAIDER EAT?
Gary LaMorte knows. He cooks their food
I
t takes a team to feed a team. For the Las Vegas Raiders, the squad of culinary professionals that keeps them sated is Honest Hospitality, founded by longtime chef Gary LaMorte. With a team of 30 people, LaMorte not only feeds the players and the coaches, but basically everyone who walks through the Raiders training facilities during four specific eating periods from 5:45 a.m. to 7 p.m. We caught up with LaMorte between busy cycles of cooking for hungry Raiders.
TORTILLA THRILLA Street tacos at Las Vegas Ballpark
shows, Instagram foodie culture, and the craft beer explosion. Nowadays, thanks in part to Koehler, you can enjoy a “Holy Roller” sushi roll at a Raiders game, a refreshing frosé at Las Vegas Ballpark, and decadent desserts while rooting for the Vegas Golden Knights at T-Mobile Arena. “Once you start adding sports teams in, everybody still has that expectation — ‘Wow, I’m in Las Vegas,’” Koehler says. “It’s gotta be elevated, the food’s gotta be fantastic. The normal things that work in neighborhood restaurants don’t function in quite the same way here.” Previously a corporate chef for MGM Resorts, Koehler found that the transition from the Strip to sports venues wasn’t as jarring as you might think. You might say he helped “Strip-ify” sports venue food from the concession booth to the special-event menu. For instance, during NHL All-Star weekend, Koehler presented A-5 Wagyu Benedicts and surf and turf as specialty menu items. He’s particularly proud of the menu he presented during the Connor McGregor vs. Dustin Poirier UFC fight last summer, which featured a “Dublin Calling” section riffing on Irish standards and a “French Quarter” section with twists on Bayou classics. Gary LaMorte, founder of Honest Hospitality, the team of chefs that cooks for the Las Vegas Raiders, says the elevation of such fare goes beyond big venues. Airports, movie theaters, even bookshop cafes have improved their offerings. “Culinary expectations are increasing across the board everywhere,” he says. “What people are finding is that with these captive audiences, if they do a better job (with food), there’s better revenue.” Of course, there are nuances to this upscaling of fan food. It still should be fundamentally easy — and
How is cooking for a pro sports team different than cooking for a restaurant? I thought that cooking was the most intense until I got to understand what it’s like to play for the NFL. They work incredibly hard. It’s incredibly demanding. It’s the highest highs and the lowest lows from week to week. The fact that they want new food constantly is a skill set we’ve developed pretty thoroughly. We have multiple development chefs that are doing new recipes and dishes every single day. On Friday, we tried 16 new dishes. How do Raiders eat differently than the rest of us? We, as a normal diners, look at food in daily or weekly blocks. With the Raiders, we’re looking at food four hours at a time. Your body is not looking for things once a day or twice a week or something like that. To repair properly, your body is looking for those building blocks many times throughout the day. We use many types of protein supplements, whether you are getting ready to go to sleep and you want a slow release for the night, or you want something that is going to be bio-available in 20 minutes from now when you’re in the gym. What’s a surprise dish that was a hit? Lobster Thermidor. We do feast nights before home games. These are big culinary productions with chilled seafood displays and roasted meats. Toward the end of the season, we wanted to do something a little different and the guys like lobster. We used an old André-esque recipe (as in renowned Strip chef André Rochat) for the thermidor, and the guys went crazy for it. Jason Harris
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TASTES LIKE VICTORY Left, Ferrarro’s Italian Street Eats at Allegiant Stadium; right, Levy’s prime rib sandwich at T-Mobile Arena
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the Atomic Fizz, made with aperol orange liqueur, Grey Goose Le Citron vodka, sparkling water, fresh prickly pear puree, fresh Hamilton lemon juice, and agave nectar. The colors reflect those of the T-Mobile brand; prickly pear is a plant synonymous with the
Southwest; finally, “atomic” brings to mind the history of nuclear testing in Nevada. So, the next time you’re getting hungry at the big game, know that there’s much more on the menu than lukewarm nachos and limp hot dogs. After all, as a Las Vegan, you deserve it. “We’re a city of hospitality,” Marron says. “Hospitality people are always looking for something good, something unique.” ✦
Strange Brew C U LT U R E
The slacker coffeehouse of yesteryear gets a reboot at Fort Bedlam BY
Andrew Kiraly
W
hat kind of magic is happening at Commercial Center lately? In the past few years, the historic shopping complex has manifested more downtown mojo than Downtown itself, bristling with an ad hoc mix of eateries, art galleries, shops, venues, and other small businesses perhaps priced out of the decidedly shinier Arts District to the north. One of Commercial Center’s more recent arrivals is Fort Bedlam. It’s a coffeehouse, but it might be better to describe it as a time warp. If its decor — a riotous pastiche of art, found objects, and rescued furniture — and vibe call to mind the slacker cafés PORTRAIT
Christopher Smith
F E R A R R O ’ S I TA L I A N S T R E E T E AT S C O U R T E S Y O F F E R R A R O ’ S ; P R I M E R I B S A N DW I C H C O U R T E S Y O F T H E L E V Y G R O U P
fundamentally fun — to eat. Inspired by his travels in Asia, Marc Marrone, chef partner at Nice Hospitality, devised the Royale with Cheese, a cheeseburger bao, served at his Graffiti Bao outlet in T-Mobile Arena. “A burger is great conceptually, but a pain in the ass to eat while you’re watching the game,” he says. “The cheeseburger bao bun is compact, hand-held, quick, and ready to go.” He adds, “For a long time, a lot of chefs looked down on stadium food. I looked at it as a fun challenge.” Achievement unlocked: Customers like his bao so much, it inspired Marrone to open another Graffiti Bao in the southwest valley. And when it comes to sports venue fare, if the food is theme-friendly, all the better. You might not expect the famous cakes of Freed’s to be a stadium staple, but at T-Mobile Arena and Allegiant, guests can indulge their sweet tooth on cheer-friendly items such as Chip Chiller ice cream sandwiches, cookie boxes, cannolis, and, an arena exclusive, freshly made donuts. Freed’s Managing Partner Max Jacobson-Fried is as surprised by the evolution of stadium food as anybody. “I always imagined that when we showed up, there would be a hot dog guy, a hamburger guy, a nachos guy — all the stuff you would buy through a distributor,” he says. Freed’s contributed to the reinvention of stadium food with a clever tribute to the Golden Knights. “We took chocolate cake and layered it with Bavarian creme and covered it in chocolate like a ding dong,” Jacobson-Fried says. “A puck cake.” Finally, with food programs like this, there must be a beverage program to match. That’s where Tony Abou-Ganim, aka “The Modern Mixologist,” comes in. Abou-Ganim is no stranger for expansive, venue-spanning cocktail programs; he was the brain behind the cocktail program at Bellagio when the resort opened. “A fresh, from-scratch margarita or Atomic Fizz with fresh prickly pear — those didn’t exist in a lot of large restaurants, much less an arena environment,” he says. For his part, Abou-Ganim wanted to do more than just throw together a mixology menu with a few fancy-sounding drinks; he wanted to play with themes and reinforce a sense of place. “The goal when we opened T-Mobile was to create a drink that would have a legacy of T-Mobile Arena, not for any specific event or team, but that it would be the drink that when you go to T-Mobile Arena,” he says. That drink is
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of the ’80s and ’90s, that’s not by accident. Owners Ben Borgman and Chris Connors essentially transplanted their storied spot, Bedlam, from Seattle to Las Vegas in July 2020. Note: Fort Bedlam is not “themed” or some kind of stylized tribute. Its scraggly aesthetic is less a calculated design than a declaration of generational identity. “I came into coffee culture in the ’80s,” Borgman says. “It’s weird to even say that — ‘coffee culture,’ eew! But that’s the stamp that was on me. I used to go to places like (legendary Seattle cafés) The Last Exit and Café Roma, which were more about the place and the people than they ever were about the coffee. The Last Exit’s coffee was actually quite awful.” From 2008 to 2020, Bedlam continued the tradition in the heart of Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood as a bustling hangout known as much for its punk
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shows as its pineapple upside-down cake. “I guess we were a throwback,” Connors says. “Because in the end, it was more about the space. Our coffee was good, but that’s really not enough. People have to have a reason to come in. Because, especially in Seattle, you can get good coffee almost anywhere.” Fort Bedlam in Commercial Center was originally intended as a second location (thus “Fort”), but between the impacts of the pandemic and the rising costs of running a small business in Seattle, the two decided to shutter Bedlam and start new in Vegas. “We looked at a few spaces, and when we came and looked at this, it was like, okay, it is a strip mall, but it is different,” Borgman
Fort Bedlam ( fortbedlam.com) is located in Commercial Center at 900 Karen Ave #A102.
CHRISTOPHER SMITH
ALL THE BUZZ The lively clutter of Fort Bedlam recalls the coffeehouse culture of the ’90s.
says. “It’s way more ‘us’ than that Town Square place.” Actually, the start isn’t entirely new: Fort Bedlam boasts much of the congenial clutter from its Seattle incarnation, and just about every piece has a story — from the graffittied restaurant booth hailing from various grunge-era Seattle hotspots (and bearing, purportedly, somewhere, Kurt Cobain’s carved initials) to an Edie Sedgwick portrait painted on a drop cloth by notable artist and naturalist Obi Kaufmann. “We put it all in a 28-foot-long truck trailer, and we unloaded it on the hottest day ever in Las Vegas,” Borgman says. (“It was 117!” Connors whimpers in disbelief.) And as a transplant to Las Vegas, Fort Bedlam’s story bends to join local history too — specifically, you can read it as an intriguing continuation, or even revival, of the city’s lively coffeehouse scene of the ’80s and ’90s, a clove-smokeclouded era of poetry readings, punk ’zines, and potent caffeine that reigned in the University District with scene stalwarts such as Café Espresso Roma and Café Copioh. In other words, Fort Bedlam is bringing back the slack. And, lest you get the wrong impression: The coffee at Fort Bedlam is good, a secret roast that Borgman keeps hush-hush. (By my palate, it’s sturdy, robust, but unfussy.) Connors, whose previous career was on the laboratory side of the pharmaceutical industry, likes to apply his scientific rigor these days to custom-blending their chai, and calls out the drink menu’s lavender mocha, Cherry Bomb (spicy cherry hot chocolate), and hot pink lemonade as some of his finest creations. “If it’s weird,” he says, “it came from me.” Just, please, resist the urge to request a fancy design on your latte foam. The very idea elicits a good-natured grumble from both of them. “This whole single-origin latte art stuff is what you do if you don’t have anything else to offer,” Borgman says. “It’s like, I have a house. That’s what we do. We do a coffeehouse. We do games and places for people to sit and hang out and meet, we do movie nights. Everybody who comes in here says the same thing: ‘Wow, I love this place.’ Honestly, I’d rather hear that than, ‘The coffee is good.’” ✦
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Purchase tickets at lvphil.org or 702.749.2000 PERFORMANCES AT THE SMITH CENTER
CULTURE C U LT U R E
KOREAN CALLIGRAPHY THROUGH JUNE 12
Between the explosive stateside popularity of K-pop and K-drama in recent years, there’s been a meteoric rise in interest in all things Korean in the West. Here’s another welcome dose: The Korean Art Calligraphy Association is showcasing the delicate beauty of the Korean written language with Hangeul Enlightens the World, an exhibit of its centuries-old Hangeul calligraphy. (Ganni Belloni) Sahara West Library, free, lvccld.org
Soul
JUDITH HILL
R O M A N : LV P H I L H A R M O N I C ; H I L L : T H E S M I T H C E N T E R ; C A L L I G R A P H Y : S A H A R A W E S T L I B R A R Y
APRIL 30
Judith Hill paid her dues performing as a backup singer for Michael Jackson, but in the last decade, Hill has deservedly stepped into the spotlight as a powerhouse chanteuse in her own right. She’ll perform in support of her 2021 album, Baby, I’m Hollywood!, a vibrant, psychedelically glowing collection of funk and soul bangers. (Andrew Kiraly) 7p, Myron’s Cabaret Jazz at The Smith Center, $39-55, thesmithcenter.com
CONCE RT
A CELLO CELEBRATION APRIL 7
As part of the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s intimate Spotlight Concert Series, Joshua Roman curates this performance of cello-forward works for small ensembles — including Roman’s own plaintive, graceful work, Offshoot. If you’re not familiar with Roman, you soon will be. Formerly the Seattle Symphony’s principal cellist, the young virtuoso has since embarked on a solo career, and the LV Phil snapped him up for its three-year Arts & Impact Residency. In other words, expect to see a lot of Roman around Vegas, delivering master classes to university students, connecting with youth in schools, and collaborating with other nonprofits to weave music into their public service missions. Consider this concert — which includes the works Lament by Anne Wilson, the overture from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Après un Rêve by Gabriele Fauré, and When the Night by Paul Wiancko — Roman’s very musical introduction to Southern Nevada. (AK) 7:30p, Troesh Studio Theater at The Smith Center, $72, lvphil.org A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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CARS
Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend Car Show APRIL 14-17
One of the main attractions of the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend — besides all those sweet pompadours — is Viva Las Vegas car show, which boasts the largest collection of pre-1964 classic cars in the United States. If you’re more a gearhead than a rock ’n’ roller, this separately ticketed event at Viva Las Vegas just might rev your engine. (GB) 10a-10p, The Orleans, $60, vivalasvegas.net
SPIRIT OF THE LAND THROUGH JULY 23 C O M E D I C DA N C E
LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO APRIL 9
How does an all-male dance company show its deep love of classical ballet? By satirizing it — at least, that’s the answer Les Ballets Trockadero came up with more than four decades ago. I’ve had my fingers crossed for a Vegas visit by the Trocks, as they’re called, since seeing last year’s PBS documentary Ballerina Boys, and my wish has come true! The company is bringing its interpretation — as technically impressive as it is comical — to the Smith Center’s main stage for one night only. (Heidi Kyser) 7:30p, Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, $29-99, thesmithcenter.com
memory, place, and our closest relationships, seems like another piece of art that could help make sense of the last two years. Daz Weller directs Gary Lunn and Valerie Carpenter Bernstein in the lead roles made famous in film by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. Weller says the presentation will be set in present day, rather than 1979, when it was written — meaning an even more profound exploration of aging. (HK) 7:30p, 2p, and 5p, Art Square Theater, $2533, theatre.vegas
T H E AT E R
ON GOLDEN POND APRIL 6-MAY 8
An elderly couple’s vacation in their longtime sanctuary is interrupted by a family visit and the reopening of old wounds — does everything evoke the COVID lockdown now, or did the pandemic just make us more attuned to the intertextual vibes that were always there? In any case, Ernest Thompson’s comedic drama On Golden Pond, with its exploration of
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How do you get people to care about public lands; specifically, the 450,000-acre swath of the Mojave Desert proposed for National Monument designation under the name Avi Kwa Ame (Yuman for “Spirit Mountain”)? Monument proponents are working every angle, including the artistic one. Searchlight activist Kim Garrison and Las Vegas photographers Mikayla Whitmore and Checko Salgado have brought together works by nearly four dozen artists and musicians in an exhibition meant to honor the land while educating the public about its cultural, ecological, and recreational significance. The organizers held hands-on community workshops leading up to the exhibition — which is being staged concurrently at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Laughlin Public Library, and Searchlight Community Center — and the show will include small pieces made by participants. (HK) Hours and location vary, free, unitedcatalystsart.com
Fundraiser
UNLVINO MAY 7
UNLVino has become an annual philanthropic institution practically synonymous with spring, and rightfully so: The mighty fundraiser has helped supply countless scholarships to UNLV hospitality students — you know, the future of Las Vegas. Fun fact: UNLVino actually began more than four decades ago in the warehouse of Southern Wine & Spirits. Today it’s the hospitality college’s biggest fundraising bash, and little surprise why — it’s become the go-to annual event for hardcore oenophiles as well as casual imbibers wanting to sample fine wines for a good cause. Now rebranded as UNLVino Presents, this year’s festivities culminate in the Grand Tasting, which pairs curated tasting menus from local restaurants with high-end wines and other spirits. Pro tip: If you’re reading this blurb, get your tickets now; this year’s “more exclusive” experience is capped at 500 lucky attendees. (AK) 6p, Hospitality Hall at UNLV’s William F. Harrah College of Hospitality, $200, unlvino.com
B A L L E T S T R O C K A D E R O : T H E S M I T H C E N T E R ; S P I R I T O F T H E L A N D : N A I D A O S L I N E ; G E O M E T R I C A L C LO U D S : C L I F F O R D S I N G E R ; C R U D E R : C O U R T E S Y A R T I S T ; B R E M E N T O W N : C L A R K C O U N T Y L I B R A R Y ; C A R N I VA L C AVA LC A D E : L A S V E G A S N AT U R A L H I S T O R Y M U S E U M
Exhibition
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
Photography
Theater
HERSTORY
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
APRIL 15-MAY 6
Art
GEOMETRICAL CLOUDS THROUGH APRIL 29
There’s a lot of complex geometry behind the seemingly random slashes and squiggles of Clifford Singer’s large, laser-cut steel sculptures — concepts such as collinear intersections and hyperspatial objects come into deep play. And little wonder: The retired math teacher has had a lifelong fascination with the intuitive beauty of geometry, and his long artistic resume reflects a prolific, productive career as much as it does someone on a quest for a cosmic truth. “My work is a mental exercise,” Singer says. But the results — at once graceful, imposing, and whimsical — are a pleasure to behold. Best of all, there’s no test at the end. (AK) 8a-5p Mon-Fri, Lobby of the Foley Federal Building, 300 Las Vegas Blvd., free, cliffordsinger.net
Erstwhile Vegas photographer Jana Cruder brings her rich, provocative portraiture back to the city in the form of a 1970s narrative exploring marriage, reproduction, and other expectations placed on women in their sexual prime. Titled Herstory, the exhibit will also include works from Cruder’s Psychedelic Skies series. An artist talk is scheduled for April 15 and an opening reception for April 21. (HK) Hours vary, Soho Lofts, free, rclinearts. com/herstory
APRIL 29-MAY 8
Opera
THE BREMEN TOWN MUSICIANS MAY 12, 14, 27, 29
In a lively operatic adaptation of this lesser-known Brothers Grimm tale, four animals — typically a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster — retire from the toil of farm life and decide to become musicians in the placid town of Bremen. But when they come across a gang of robbers burglarizing a home, they join forces to get their slapstick vigilante on! (AK) 7p May 12, Clark County Library, free; 3p May 14, Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, $25; 7p May 27, Windmill Library, free; 3p May 29, West Charleston Library, free, operalasvegas.com
Who among us hasn’t dreamed of escaping to an enchanted forest with a prankster fairy and some magical flower juice and trolling the locals? The dream comes true — theatrically speaking — with comic fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the 2021-’22 season closer for Nevada Conservatory Theatre. Despite Garry Marshall’s best efforts, Bill Shakespeare’s late-sixteenth-century story of misplaced affection and mistaken identity still reigns as best rom-com ever, a perfect blend of plot twists and visual gags that ends in happily ever after. Times three. (HK) 7:30p and 2p, UNLV Judy Bayley Theatre, $8.50-$25, unlv.edu/nct/ season-info
Festival
The Carnival Cavalcade of Canorous Creatures! APRIL 9
In 1886, French Composer Camille Saint-Saëns composed The Carnival of the Animals, a charming musical suite of 14 short movements. Thing is, he kept The Carnival of the Animals on the DL, forbidding any public performance of it while he was alive, worried such a frivolous work might hurt his image as a “serious composer.” Welp, Saint-Saëns died in 1921, and in 1922, the suite was performed to great public delight and lots of dignified lulz. The ultimate lol: It became Saint-Saëns’ most popular work. Now nonprofit Notes With a Purpose is putting on The Carnival Cavalcade of Canorous Creatures!, in which musicians situated throughout the Las Vegas Natural History Museum perform Carnival as kids scour the museum on a scavenger hunt, as well as enjoying face-painting, food trucks, a raffle, and more music in the nearby park. (AK) 10a and 1p, Las Vegas Natural History Museum, $10-12, free for kids under 18, lvnhm.org A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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In a city that grows warmer every year, there’s nothing unusual anymore about the Vdara death ray BY
Krista Diamond
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“
We booked a suite with a fountain view room,” TripAdvisor user Sarahd8119 wrote in a 2018 review of the Vdara Hotel & Spa. She went on to describe the blackout curtains, the mini bar, the kitchen. “The pool was okay,” she concluded. “The death ray was intense but manageable.” There are 76 TripAdvisor reviews of the Vdara containing the words “death ray.” The hotel, for its part, prefers the term “solar convergence phenomenon.” But let’s back up. In December 2009, the 57-story Vdara Hotel & Spa opened on the Las Vegas Strip. It was, and still is, a beautiful property, free of gimmicks. There are no rides, no halfsize replicas of iconic landmarks from other places. There’s no casino, no theme, no smoking. It is sleek and shiny. Standing outside of it, you get the feeling you could be in any city, going to work in a high-rise or returning home to an apartment on the 30th floor. I’ve stayed at the Vdara three times, always in a room facing west, away from the Strip with a view of the swirling stretch of I-15 below, the twinkling lights of the neighborhoods, the Spring Mountains bordering the west valley. The rooms have parlors and kitchens, which makes it easy to indulge in the fantasy that I live there, that this is the sophisticated metropolitan existence I’ve always secretly longed for. Whenever I’m trying to convey a sense of yes I am a real person and this is a real city to someone, I take them to the Vdara’s lobby bar for gin and tonics with rose petals and ribbons of cucumbers. Approve of me, I command silently as we sip. Approve of Las Vegas. And they do.
I L L U S T R AT I O N : S C OT T L I E N
Blast from the Past WRITER IN RESIDENCE
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
I love the Vdara. And loving the Vdara means loving the Vdara death ray. The Vdara death ray entered the public consciousness shortly after the hotel opened. Pool-goers were experiencing something unsettling: singed hair, melting plastic cups, sunburns that felt like chemical burns. The reason? On certain hot days, the sun would hit the concave glass of the hotel and reflect down onto a 10- by 15-foot space by the pool in a highly concentrated wave (or to put it in middle school terms, the magnifying glass-and-ants effect). Staff nicknamed it the Vdara death ray. An obvious question: Who could have seen this coming? Well, everyone kind of did. The hotel reportedly had been aware of the design flaw before the property opened and had installed non-reflective film on the glass to reduce the death ray’s power by 70 percent. Big blue umbrellas were brought in to shade pool-goers. But people were still burned. Vacationers awakened from poolside daydreams to wildfire heat. Like a laser beam, the white-hot light from the Vdara found them. And here’s the really weird thing: The building’s architect, Rafael Viñoly, went on to design a similar structure in London in 2013. The solar convergence created by Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street project, nicknamed the Fryscraper, melted plastic panels on a nearby parked car and scorched the carpet of a hair salon across the street. When asked about that project, Viñoly told the Guardian, “We made a lot of mistakes with this building, and we will take care of it,” but he also suggested global warming might be a factor. When asked about the Vdara’s problem, however, he suggested that corporate indifference overruled his concerns: “We pointed out that (focused sunlight) would be an issue too, but who cares if you fry somebody in Las Vegas, right?” The “who cares?” sentiment is cruel in the way tourist depictions of Las Vegas often are. It reminds me of a group of men at the Flamingo pool who asked where I was from and then mocked the response. “Who would actually want to live here?” they asked over the rushing of an artificial waterfall one of them would later vomit into. Bored of me, they moved on to sexually harassing a cocktail waitress and demanding free shots of Fireball from a bartender. Who cares if you fry somebody in Las Vegas, indeed. Viñoly has a point. You wouldn’t anticipate getting burned by light reflecting off a building in foggy London, but if it happens in a desert city, well, what did you really expect?
At least I didn’t until June A few years ago, I met up 30, 2013, when Las Vegas hit with a friend in San Diego. Even 117. And then again on June when I’m away for a short time, 20, 2017. And again on July I miss Las Vegas desperately, 10, 2021. The record high like a high school girl misses her of 117 was set in 1942, but it boyfriend. I said something to was a freak occurrence back that effect on this night, and my Editor’s note: then. Now it’s happened three friend turned to me and said, “I This is the second times in less than a decade. In hate that you live there. No one of six columns fact, Las Vegas is one of the should have built a city in the in which Krista fastest-warming cities in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Diamond explores United States. According to It’s a waste of water, and it’s the intersection Climate Central, the temperatoo hot.” where Las Vegas, ture rose 5.76 degrees between I drank my beer and leaned pop culture, 1970 and 2018. And it keeps against the railing of the rooftop media myths, getting hotter. bar, tasting the salt of the Pacific and urban legend I used to think summers in the air, longing for the creomeet. Krista is an in Las Vegas were magic. In sote of home. I shrugged. “It’s MFA candidate in June, the sun is white, the air not that bad.” UNLV’s creative charged. In July, monsoons Whenever someone speaks writing program. turn cliffs into waterfalls. of the Vegas heat, my answer is Her work has Summer means floating in the same: It’s not that bad. It’s appeared in The the lazy river at Mandalay easy for me to say that it’s not New York Times, Bay. Summer means putting that bad because I once spent HuffPost, Elecon something skimpy and a summer in the hottest place tric Literature, sparkly and hitting a rooftop on earth. Death Valley, located Narratively, and bar at night. Summer means 120 miles west of Las Vegas, reelsewhere. climbing Mt. Charleston, corded the hottest temperature paddling the Colorado River, in on Earth — 134 degrees — in exiting a dark movie theater, 1913. Since then, it’s set other and feeling the warm air on your skin, the heat-related records — the greatest number desert embracing you, holding you. In a of consecutive days with a temperature way, the Vdara death ray is a part of that above 100 degrees, the hottest ground temmagic —this fleeting specter that only visits perature ever (201 degrees), long stretches of in the summer. It’s a ritual. A story people days over 110 degrees, even longer stretches tell each other that sounds too strange to of days over 120 degrees. The summer I be true. Solar convergence phenomenon. spent there, during which I worked at the The term is mystical, celestial. front desk of a hotel, came close to breaking And it’s funny. Very funny. the all-time record. Every day for a week, Every summer on the internet, people in reporters called and asked if I thought it was Las Vegas share the same memes. An image going to happen. It doesn’t matter, I kept of a man engulfed in flames: Summer in telling them; once it gets above 117, it’s all the Vegas be like. Two skeletons in pool chairs: same. At 117, jewelry burns your skin, your But it’s a dry heat. Tourists in Death Valley car overheats as you flee to the mountains, make these jokes too, but the locals stopped your air conditioner wheezes as it fights laughing a long time ago. At what point will to keep the room at 90. Every day you are we stop laughing in Las Vegas? aware that the environment itself is actively The Vdara death ray is unbelievable and trying to kill you. Doing anything outside real. Humorous and cruel. Seasonal and is stupid. Even after midnight, it’s still over eternal. But as the temperature continues to 100 degrees, the dry earth pulsing with heat, rise in Las Vegas, it is becoming something the black sky above you, indifferent. Above else too: ordinary. As you recline beneath 117 degrees is when people really lose it. your blue umbrella on the Vdara pool deck, Minor disagreements turn into fistfights the sunlight might shift, might hit the glass turn into broken whiskey bottles used as wall of the building, might burn you. But weapons. The summer I lived in Death other things will burn you too. The handle of Valley, people died. Some from what the your car door. The sidewalk outside of your heat did to their bodies — hikers lost in house. The sandstone in the desert. Every canyons without water. Others from what part of the place you call home. Who cares the heat did to their minds — a coworker if you fry somebody in Las Vegas? After all, who drank himself to death. to live in Las Vegas is to burn. ✦ So no, I don’t think it’s that bad in Las Vegas. A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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ESSAY
WHO DO YOU NEED ME TO BE? The pandemic forced tourists to see us hospitality workers as the real people we were all along BY
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I am looking down the length of a massage table that’s dressed in rich linen. I am using it as a writing table. I’ve used this room as a writing space for 10 years; before that, I used it as a place to hide my hangovers. To steal a line from Virginia Woolf, this is a room of my own (except on Mondays and Tuesdays, when it belongs to a different woman with different things to hide). I am an aesthetician; it is my job to beautify and rejuvenate. This room is full of bottled potential, perfumed purpose. Things emulsify in this room; they marry, compress, and relax. Things disappear in this room: worry, dehydration, money. I disappear in this room. I am just a pair of lavender hands and the word certainly. I am a voice floating outside closed doors, whispering, May I enter? In retrospect, I have trained my whole life for this career. Hyper-vigilance born of a dysfunctional childhood turned out to be just the trait required to meet the high standards set by Forbes in order to be awarded five-star recognition for a resort spa in Las Vegas. I know just when to unleash a cascade of elegant variations of Are you comfortable? I can sense when you’ve become overstimulated by the roulette wheel on the casino floor, when you’re afraid of solitude but someone booked this service for you and it becomes my job to ease you into the terrifying ecstasy of self-care. I become whoever you need me to be in this room. Everything adjusts: temperature, lighting, sound, texture. Even I am pliable, adaptable, at your service, needless. Do you need me to co-sign your delusion? It would be my pleasure. Need me to listen to your confessions, your hungers, your bloated grief ? I am a vacuum of space; pour into me and I will take form. My nervous system and my belief system are muted. (A co-worker of mine once burst a blood vessel in her eye while stifling a sneeze — thinking that the autonomic, the histamine-driven processes too vulgar or human.) This has always been the safest angle for me, to be a hovering kindness in a gold-trimmed kimono, a magnetic badge announcing my name. If I forget my name badge, I can borrow a spare one from the drawer of abandoned name badges. I can be anyone. Who do you need me to be? ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉
Jennifer Battisti
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Please check your appearance” — back-of-the-house mirror
In Las Vegas resorts and casinos, the illusion of timelessness, of endless indul.
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ILLUSTRATION
Dom McKenzie
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
gence must move in a seamless, liquid way that hides the real, the blemished. The hospitality machine can never appear too complicated. It mucks up the fantasy that we workers are always available, but we exist only when you’re hungry or thirsty, lonely or bored. A guest asks me: Where do the cocktail waitresses come from? They seem to just materialize from patterns in the wallpaper, or up from the manic carpet like beaming parade floats, never a run in their pantyhose or a pulse in their outstretched arm. Hospitality holograms, I joked with the guest, and yet it’s not too far a stretch. We are in charge of the levers and pulleys, the trap doors and subterranean tunnels, where, beneath the action, a whole underground community marches along a less ritzy runway lined with scavenged carpet from imploded casinos and scuffed-up banquet chairs saved from the abyss of liquidation sales. Hospitality holograms play chess in the dealer’s lounge, flaunting perfectly manicured hands — hands like butter, hands that speak, levitate, pitch, rake. When these hands are in motion, the casino floor looks like a field of spinning windmills shuffling luck itself. Hospitality holograms shop at the employee store, essentially an enormous vending machine filled with travel-size Excedrin, Cup Noodles, and rows and rows of pantyhose. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ AT FIRST, I was surprised that everyone was coming to Las Vegas during a global health crisis. Did they want a slice of the slashed hotel room prices? Did they want a glimpse of the bizarre emptiness? Some of the tourists were appalled that the virus even existed in Vegas. What kind of monster sneeze-guards Vegas? It’s an oxymoron and a threat to the whole architecture of distraction. Initially, I was angry at having to weigh a paycheck against my health and my family’s health — angry at having to carry this glittering ball we call commerce over the threshold of human decency. And yet, while presenting a tourist with their “mask coaster,” I was often told that I was the first stranger to touch them since the world shut down. This cut right through my PPE and into my heart. They’d remove their face covering and place it onto the disposable luxury paper towel, where it waited for 50 minutes like a blue breathable nightmare finally ignored. Tourists were escaping — four quarantine walls, wildfires, the shrinking spirits of darkening teenage children; they were running from a screen which tallied pandemic deaths with 9/11 airplane icons.
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ESSAY The intelligence in service positions is anticipatory empathic dexterity. There is wisdom in hands-on work. Jobs deemed “manual labor” are not less meaningful as a vocation, especially in Las Vegas, where attunement to others’ needs is the backbone of the city. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ NOW LAS VEGAS is at full capacity again. The
plexiglass was removed like a pandemic striptease. I feel the fullness of the tourists’ touch deficit. I am the person they imagined over the telephone, weeks ago, the pleasure promised with a held credit card. Their desire rubs up against my convictions against capitalism, corruption, greed. It says, You’re the one who gets to be the first — to feel their loneliness, to witness their undressed wound of isolation. How can I turn away from the messiness of our biology, the petri dish of belonging? As the pandemic leaks into its third year, and business has steadily increased to an unsustainable level, I realize it’s not the grim spectacle of Vegas during a pandemic that’s causing the increase in business; rather, it’s the same spell that has always made this place so hypnotic, only now it’s garnished with a fat slice of nostalgia, creating an even bigger ache for a hit of forgetfulness. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉
EVERYONE TRIES TO pin down Las Vegas, to
stub it out into a smoldering noun they can describe and thus extinguish, but you can’t capture Vegas. It’s a shapeshifting ether made of the collective yearning of its patrons. Vegas is the sound an elevator door makes at 3 a.m., feet drunkenly padding a carpeted hallway lined with sloppy room service trays and cannabis clouds. A boardroom full of marketing execs can’t predict what the city will do next. Vegas is the perpetual wardrobe change. It is a sensation — orgasm, heat stroke. When the pandemic hollowed out the city, when it was empty of the energy of potential, Vegas became colossal buildings with dry fountains. Do fountains even exist when there is no one to shove out of the way to get a good snapshot? Vegas and desire have a symbiotic relationship. The Vegas vortex calls to the wanting: a cowboy, a Mormon settler, a mobster, a nuclear physicist, a president with a New Deal, a lone gambler, an outlaw, thousands of broken souls who are summoned to the Mojave Desert, by what? The dirt. A Vegas vortex begging to be materialized. The people came, pointed to the vast emptiness, and called it “The Future.”
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My father was one of those souls. He was emotionally troubled and wickedly smart, working tirelessly to outwit a disability that resulted from contracting polio as a child. At 23, he rode out from Florida on a motorcycle he’d rebuilt to accommodate his leg brace. He lived in Naked City day-rate motels hustling card games until he landed a real gig as a blackjack dealer at the Jackpot Casino. He was captivated for the rest of his life by the Vegas vortex. Eventually, he became the director of the World Series of Poker, but not without handing over his physical and mental health in exchange for success. Bosses kept promising him an eventual place to sit down. He finally got it when he was forced to retire after his leg brace shattered during a fitting, and he moved on to a wheelchair. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ THE REAL LAS Vegas is beneath Paradise. It’s the squeaky wheel of the bellman’s cart, the cleaning crew’s “Pardon the Mess” sign. It is the casino-cage mothers, shrinking in their sameness, graveyard chip-runners, hostesses with megabuck grins and hot-sauce holsters. They all wave to their children who slip by silently year after year like monorails every hour on the hour. The real Vegas is the toddler in the 24-hour daycare, two blocks west of the Strip. It’s the Hallway of Sighs, underneath the casino, where workers come and go, where they rebuild and disassemble their identities each shift, their wordless grief exhaled in transit among the hospitality haunts of decades past, still lingering as an omen in overhead fluorescence. It’s the employee escalator up to the casino floor that eats dreams and spits out rotator cuff surgeries in exchange. The real Vegas is a construction cone suffocating a flyer for the Leghorn Bar at the Chicken Ranch, it’s an employee garage just before sunrise off Koval and Spring Mountain, it lives in the armpit of Industrial Road, between a package liquor shop and the Little Darlings sign, which during the quarantine read: Sorry, we’re clothed. You don’t hear about the stories of the hospitality holograms, stories about how design decisions, abusive scheduling, and service expectations affect the health of employees and their families. This is because calculated distance from the guest is as paramount as attention to detail. Invisibility is part of the required uniform; it’s stuffed inside the numbered garment bag sailing the mile-long conveyor in the back of the house. Bringing visibility to the humans who make up roughly 60 percent of the
Vegas workforce would dampen the ethical amnesia; it would challenge the idea that Vegas is an honest city, the cure for the common life. It would illuminate what is sacrificed to keep the vortex pulsing. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉
me hopeful during the pandemic is the way it forced a crack in the veneer of the simplicity of hospitality. The reprieve the guest imagines when they book their trip online suddenly shifts to discomfort when they arrive and see us masked up and risking exposure for the sake of the “essential” pursuit of pleasure. A twinkle of accountability in their eyes gives me hope. My conversations with guests are no longer about the crab legs in the buffet, the most hydrating eye cream, what show to see on a Saturday night; they are about loss, most of it ambiguous and unfelt until arriving to this place that promises to suspend reality. They share their experiences and ask me about mine. They ask if I have kids, how I managed to show up for work and juggle distance learning. They ask if my family is safe. I don’t tell them that even though I am fully vaccinated I had a breakthrough case of COVID, which I then passed onto my daughter. I don’t attempt to explain the complexities of contact tracing on the Strip, where a guest might come in contact with hundreds of people from all over the world in under an hour. Instead, I savor this tiny instance of humanity in our evolving interactions. This experience of being seen transcends my role in the service industry and allows me to be a real person, momentarily. It’s just my hands on humans without the division of class blocking the connection. Storytelling has the power to create visible tension; it has the power to expose the underbelly of tourism, and with it socioeconomic inequality. Each time there is a genuine interaction between guest and employee, thanks to the shared trauma of a global pandemic, I feel hopeful for the visibility of the hospitality industry. Could Vegas, the sufferer of perpetual imposter syndrome, be craving enlightenment as its next charade? Is the vortex hungry for the spectacle of authenticity? Only the dirt knows for sure. Its radioactive persistence is sure to keep us pivoting for the next big thing to go boom in the desert. ✦
WHAT HAS MADE
Jennifer Battisti is a lifelong Nevadan. Her latest work is the experimental memoir Off Boulder Highway (Tolsun Books, 2021).
BEST OF THE CITY
We celebrated the best of the best on March 15 with great music and cocktails inside AREA15. Winners worked the room, revelers took in the scenery, and everyone had just the best time.
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HISTORY
OUR GRAND ADVENTURE Why MGM’s strange, doomed theme park of the ’90s was a touchstone of a generation — and radically ahead of its time BY
Greg Blake Miller
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he MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park was born in the Las Vegas backlot of the brand-new world’s largest hotel on December 18, 1993, and died for its business sins less than seven years later. The 33-acre park — about half the size of Disneyland’s appendage, California Adventure — was a celebration of a hypothetical studio with hypothetical sets for hypothetical movies. The core attraction was a river tour along which fake films with names like Temple of Gloom and Jungle Storm were being fakeshot. It was an unwitting mockumentary, a trip behind the scenes of scenes that never happened, an investigation of the façades of façades to reveal the plywood plank of absurdity on which real blockbusters, dumb as the fake ones, rested. When you got off the raft, you could explore such environments as turn-of-the century Brooklyn, French Street, and Asian Village. These, too, represented nothing but what they were; they evoked neither movie sets nor the places themselves, but rather the earnestness of propping up enough wood and stucco to transform one little corner of the
desert for one kid on one fine day. You could wander half a block through Old England and capture the faux Tudors on your point-andshoot Yashica; you could see an arrow-shaped sign pointing to a New Yorkish pawn shop. There was a roaming costumed lion who was supposed to represent the MGM logo’s regal Leo but was, for some reason, named Looey. Parents paused to photograph their children hugging this stranger. The park’s thematic underdevelopment could be a gift for the crowded mind: The Grand Adventure could be whatever you wanted it to be, if you had the imagination to make it something. Or maybe you’d just forget it: Visit YouTube today, 21 years after the park’s demise, and you’ll find, beneath videos shaky and sure, the comments of thirtysomethings grateful for the reassurance that this dimly recalled place was not just a dream. The execution was not, as a new generation of marketers would put it a decade later, “sticky.” But here’s the irony: In the memories of Las Vegans of my generation — the one so eclipsed and disemboweled by time that it can only sign its name “X” — it’s precisely
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the slippery randomness of the place that makes it stick as an all-purpose synecdoche for Family Vegas, the Strip’s audacious, Disney-tinted rebranding experiment that lasted roughly from the completion of the Excalibur in June 1990 until September 2000, when Grand Adventures closed to the general public. The park was, for a while, so oblivious to the value of its own real estate, so wackily invested in being all things to all families, so devoted to fulfilling our platonic vision of a theme park, that in retrospect it seems almost imaginary. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ GRAND ADVENTURES WAS born too late, on the wobbly pontoon bridge between the age of presence and the coming epoch of telepresence. By 1995, with the introduction of Internet Explorer, the Web would become not only mainstream, but almost obligatory in American life; lived experience began its gradual shrinkage to the size of a human palm, where fellowship would reside on screens and joy would become a solitary sport. Read into that what you will. It’s taken 30 years, two of them as masked shut-ins, to realize that we need each other in the flesh. Humans, if they don’t kill each other first, are ready to become the new old big thing. It’s good for families to be somewhere and do something with other members of the species: That’s the logic of Area 15 and the High Roller and the revivified and relocated Wet ’n’ Wild. It’s the logic of the sporting venues sprouting like mushrooms on every second street-corner. It was the doomed logic of Grand Adventures. It doesn’t seem so doomed anymore. On the eve of its debut, Grand Adventures seemed almost like a whim, a fine gift to Young Vegas. But it was pure poetic business strategy, blindered in hot pursuit of tourist gold. For our generation, one quick with irony — especially when it came to the exploits of the Gekko set — and well-schooled by a folk-rock revival, it was easy to imagine some new Dylan marking the occasion with acidic glee:
The bosses with money thought The Boomers with children could be Brought to the city where they’d Drop off their children at The gates of Adventure then Turn back to the darkness For a drink and a smoke And a bad hand of blackjack.
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attached to their children to leave them at home with a grandma or grandpa or sitter. But if Boomer parents were too attached to leave the kids at home, why would they suddenly feel comfortable dropping them for the day at a theme park in the backlot of a Vegas hotel? Ponder that. Who remembers this place fondly, and why? Not the Boomer parents, who weren’t that impressed in the first place, nor their Boomerkids, the ones who thought they’d been dreaming all this time. The memories are sharpest for the long-lost pre-digital teens of the early ’90s, the ragged wanderers of Gen X, kids hatched in the Swinging Seventies, latchkey survivors of front-yard football and parental divorce and the death throes of disco and the lingering sounds of Queen and the long, long hours waiting for someone to come home. These kids, freerange from the start, knew what it was like to play sports that were not organized, to make a best friend after a fistfight, to come home with a bruise. What they didn’t know was
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the heart of their inimitable city, because the Strip never wanted them around. Then came word that the new MGM would have a theme park — a beachhead from which a restless underage cohort in big hair and flannel could lay claim to the forbidden city. Or at least land a summer job. Like a lot of cool ideas that turn out disappointing, Grand Adventures was sweetest of all before it existed and after it was gone. In the prospective tense, it could still turn out to be anything; in the retrospective tense, it could be remembered as better than it was. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ WHAT CAN YOU say about X, a sign consciously signifying both anything and nothing? X accelerated the country’s micro-fracturing from culture into subcultures. X earnestly carved the terrain once known as pop into fan fiefdoms long before niche passions, hopped up on the power of social media, coalesced into the paradox of Collective Niche Fandom and became the very essence
of pop. But X was not obsessed with being known. X created ’zines with circulations so low that you could have drawn each copy by hand. It didn’t really matter: The thing had been made and it was nothing more than what it was, an experience that didn’t need to be known. It happened, photographs or not. Because film costs money, you know. And so Generation X was a perfect match for a theme park that was bound to be forgotten. The experience economy was not yet what it is today, which is to say, the economy of life not so much lived as repackaged for follower approval. It was enough, in that sliver of time between the opening of Grand Adventures and the crowning of the Web as the imperial power of our End Times, to share an experience in person with four people you knew and laugh about it — or at it — the next day before allowing it to fade in your mind into the pleasant haze of non-Instagrammed legend. There was a little coaster called Lightning Bolt that whisked you through the dark but not quite to space. There was
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BEMUSEMENT PARK MGM Grand Adventures didn’t really boast a cohesive theme, just a sometimes-confusing collection of geographic and pop-culture references. But, strangely, that was part of its charm.
a sweet high-tech motion-and-screen ride called Deep Earth Exploration that plunged you down through the magma. There were, particularly toward the end, carnival-style rides like the Zipper, rides parked on the pavement, rides with no larger ambition than to raise your heart rate and empty your gut. There was a ride through Colorado rapids; the age of Family Vegas loved nothing so much as water. And of course there was a ride that dropped you from a very great height: Your stomach would join with your throat and you could scream without sound because your stomach was blocking the sound and you’d lost all control but were somehow, for that moment, king of the world, queen of the world, you of the world, in your very own Vegas of the mind. Grand Adventures had no story to stitch all this together. That was the beauty of the place: MGM didn’t tell us what to think because it didn’t know what it thought. Whether out of generosity or laziness or budget cuts, Grand Adventures had skipped the narrative, this idea that we needed someone with a degree in crafting the arc of experience just so, so that we’d be picked up at just the right moment and dropped off at just the right place, to exit at the gift shop. The park’s dopey magic was precisely in its inefficiency, that rarest and
most endangered substance in the world, a thing we loved even before we knew it was about to die on the screen upon which we would live out the remainder of our lives. We didn’t want to be picked up at the right time or dropped off at the right place. That was the whole point of our Vegas, our stillborn Vegas, our Vegas that never had a chance. In the slim space between the plastic ’80s and the pixilated forever, we saw our shot at a city. But they charged us $25 for admission, and we didn’t have that kind of dough. So we — well, who am I kidding, I — only went once. All this nostalgia, all this justification of dreams, all the words in the article you’re reading, and, yes, I only went once. It just wasn’t that good. By 1997, the money folks at MGM knew it too, and lopped off a third of the Park to create a glamourous pool that understood the future: The theme of Las Vegas was Vegas. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ WE WON’T FORGET what might have been, had the glorious mistake that was Grand Adventures worked just a little better, just enough to prolong the age of inefficiency. But we don’t remember the days of Family Vegas for greatness. We remember them
for their incompleteness. Incompleteness is always and forever, the thing that keeps us dreaming. And so you’ll still find us, here in the present, thinking how nice it is that they named the new swim park the same as the old one, still very wet, but a little less wild. You’ll find us saluting the indomitable obsolescence of the Excalibur, which never delivered on the promise of its battlements but keeps winning, like a ball-control quarterback, simply by surviving. You’ll find us admiring the razor-sharp blackness of the Luxor, which delivered on form but never content. You’ll find us remembering rainstorms at Desert Passage and the harangues of fat Bacchus at the Forum Shops and the Battle of Treasure Island before the place was seduced by sirens and reduced to its initials. You’ll find us wondering why Circus Circus never felt quite right and pondering the frisson of its wrongness. You’ll find us missing the arterial neon of the Dunes sign, rising, falling, forever recirculating, spelling that word, letter by letter, making a beautiful promise for the nothing-much inside. You’ll find us driving through Downtown, which still remembers and even practices inefficiency, remembering when the Hacienda horseman was on the South Strip in front of a thing called the Hacienda Hotel, whose parts were packed up and sent to Mandalay. You’ll find us remembering a Fremont Street where Vegas Vic’s hat was taller and his waving hand glowed against a black, black sky and the street felt like day in the middle of the night because, as any kid could tell you, that’s what lights are for. You’ll find us staring up at that great, gold idol of an MGM lion and remembering its predecessor, a piece of angular abstract art, a lion that took itself less seriously and, like a trickster, invited you to enter through its throat. And you’ll find us, on very rare occasions and for no particular reason, rolling down Koval Drive, looking at the big backlot where the condos of the rich tower over the erstwhile Emerald City. And if you could read our minds, or maybe just our lips, you’d know our thoughts: There used to be a theme park here, it promised a grand adventure, the adventure never really came, and we miss it anyway. We thought it might be the beginning of our Vegas. But, like all things, it was only the beginning of a burnished memory, a phantom city that never was and which cannot be knocked down. And we whisper to the next generations, take your inspiration where you will. ✦ A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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COASTING THROUGH LIFE Thrill rides aren’t just for kids. Here’s why amusement parks have an enduring appeal for grownups like me BY
Mike Prevatt
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t’s 6 a.m. on a Thursday and I’m on I-15, hurtling toward the California border. I don’t have an assignment, but I do have a plan: Charge through the northwestern part of the Mojave. Arrive at the gates of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia in time for its 10:30 a.m. opening. Book it all the way to the back of the park,
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where its newest shoot-the-looper, West Coast Racers, coils through its respective themeland like an unraveled Slinky. The pandemic has kept me from riding it sooner, but I’ll have taken at least one lap by 11 a.m. From there, pick up my routine: Ride the park’s northern coasters until lunch at the usual barbecue place. Chill for an hour so
my grilled chicken salad doesn’t eject full throttle after riding Full Throttle. Hit my favorite roller coaster on the planet (X2), followed by my second-favorite in the park (Twisted Colossus). Ride some more, but stop at the slightest sign of a headache. Drive home — as in, my actual apartment back in Las Vegas — which I walk into just shy of 10 p.m. This is the third time I’ve turned-andburned a day trip to Magic Mountain, twice without company. You can imagine my struggle to coax pals to drive 600 miles and walk 15,000 steps in one day. But despite my preference to go to amusement parks with friends, I cared not one whit that I was riding solo. I was partaking in something I can’t do very often, and no one was nagging me about their tired feet or waking up at sunrise or my insistence on waiting for the front row. It’s the same ideal that prompted me to forgo human baggage for my last visit to Walt Disney World. I was on cloud nine — blissfully transported by imagineered worlds that, for me, rival the less visceral
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regional theme park. escapades of a movie or book. Some also find their pack through meeting I’m not alone in this pursuit. Millions of up or trekking to parks. “The (coaster/ perfectly uncreepy adults frequent amusepark) community is quite niche,” Pavlock ment parks all over the country — including says. “It’s rare you meet people my age that Las Vegans, who don’t have Magic Mountain have done these (park) trips. But I’ve been or Disneyland-style parks in their backyard, a member (of the community) since I was a but can get to them with relative ease. kid. I have a lot of lifelong friends from it.” “My friends and I make theme parks a And then there are those who go because reason to go on a trip,” says 34-year-old John of the inherent, traditional joys of amusePavlock, a Las Vegan who grew up going ment parks. The beckoning to Southern California parks smell of funnel cakes. The annually. “We’ll go sightseeing Annual wonder of a park’s theming. in the city we’re in, but a theme passes enable And the rollergasm — or, less park has to be in the mix.” enthusiasts hyperbolically, the pleasure The question always surfaces: to embark on that comes specifically from Why would a grownup without multi-park thrill rides. children endure an institution trips where “I’m an adrenaline junkie,” most people associate with long, they may says Reichen Gihbsson, 30, a unshaded queues and stale shoehorn local who’s been crisscrossing churros? The reasons abound: in two, even three parks the country to visit amusenostalgia — specifically, a rea day. ment parks since he was a turn to one’s childhood with child. “I’m riding a machine the benefit of adult control; a that’s putting my body through an experisafer mode of thrillseeking and escape ence that I can’t do anywhere else unless (cue writer Douglas Coupland: “Adventure I’m in a fighter plane.” without risk is Disneyland”); the increasing Someone who could write a thesis on sophistication of rides and parks; expanded why grown-ass adults frequent these instiadult amenities and events (i.e., alcohol tutions of American teendom is Elizabeth stands and wine-and-food festivals); and, Ringas, the communications director and with the exception of the ever-more exmid-Atlantic regional rep for American pensive Disney destinations, the general Coaster Enthusiasts. First, she clarifies affordability of driving to and visiting a
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the difference between someone who occasionally takes their niece to ride Canyon Blaster at Adventuredome and an actual coaster enthusiast. “We look at it as someone who wants to expand their hobby of riding coasters,” Ringas says. “Maybe they want to read coaster articles, or make (enthusiast) friends or attend the parks in a different way — basically, they want to take it to a different level.” As Ringas elaborates, adult coaster enthusiasts — more than 6,500 of them are card-carrying ACE members — enjoy the same things the kids do, as well as the details that they might overlook. They are park enthusiasts too. “I would say the coasters are what takes us (to the parks) — that’s why we’re there,” she says. “But most of us really appreciate the distinction about the parks. What else makes it special? Maybe they have a unique dark ride (an indoor ride). Or maybe it’s the food. We treasure those aspects. At an (ACE) Coaster Con, we celebrated a carousel because it was 100 years old.” Social media has increased the exposure of “thoosies,” as coaster enthusiasts are sometimes called, and subsequently, the parks they frequent. Their Instagram stories and Facebook trip reports serve as
COAST E R S : CO U RT E SY S I X F L AG S
CURVE APPEAL The Twisted Colossus, left, and Full Throttle at Six Flags Magic Mountain
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public photo diaries of their adventures, FOMO-instilling flexes, and viral marketing that amusement companies couldn’t buy. For some enthusiasts, coasters and parks — and even traveling to them — are enjoyed monthly, maybe weekly, usually possible because of season-pass programs. Gihbsson, who visits Magic Mountain every other month, owns a top-of-the-line membership that grants him not only a slew of VIP perks, but access to every other park in the Six Flags chain. Pavlock has a Six Flags pass as well — along with ones for the Cedar Fair parks (which includes Knott’s Berry Farm near Disneyland) and Universal Studios. But neither will cough up for Disneyland’s annual pass, which costs as much as $1,400. Passes enable enthusiasts to embark on multi-park, multi-state trips, where they may shoehorn in two, even three parks a day. And when it comes to a forthcoming ride, the parks’ hype game is strong for a reason. “Most members travel out of state commonly, typically when a new coaster opens,” Ringas says. “It’s almost a pilgrimage where everyone I know goes to that park for that new ride.” Last year’s enthusiast mecca was Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, which opened the Jurassic World VelociCoaster. This year, it’ll likely be 90 minutes away in Tampa, where Busch Gardens finally opened the COVID-delayed Iron Gwazi. Coaster nerds also may travel halfway around the globe, less for specific coasters and more for bucket-list destinations like Phantasialand in Germany, Tokyo DisneySea — Pavlock’s number-one park — and Warner Bros. Movie World in Australia. And then there are the credit whores. A credit count is the tally of unique coasters someone has ridden at least once. Some forgo certain credits because the coasters just aren’t worth riding (I’m an unabashed coaster snob; you can spare me the painful Vekoma Boomerangs and nauseating Gerstlauer spinners). But many others are completists, even obsessives. You know that kiddie coaster at the Las Vegas Mini Grand Prix? I’ve heard enthusiast tourists admit they Ubered all the way from the Strip to Rainbow Boulevard and Vegas Drive just to ride it. They scour every city they visit for those rare, isolated, or awkward credits, undeterred by anyone’s scorn, zealous in their quest to reach the next credit milestone. I’m within a hair of 250 myself. And that’s no brag — Ringas has north of 560. And the top scorer on the Coaster Count website claims to have 2,934
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Road Trippable Amusement Parks for Las Vegans Anaheim’s crown jewel, Disneyland, remains the ultimate get-outta-Vegas destination for both families and enthusiasts (despite the low-thrill nature of the park’s coasters), especially now that COVID restrictions have slackened and all of its new Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge attractions are fully operational. And with Disney and Universal Studios in an all-out, spare-no-expense war to outbuild, outtheme and outinnovate each other, both Southern California hotspots are at their peaks — though you’ll pay triple-digit ticket prices to enjoy their one-upmanship. Happily, there are cheaper options in Southern California. Later this year, Magic Mountain will open its 20th roller coaster, a Wonder Woman-themed whoosher that careens and flips on a single rail. Many consider Knott’s Berry Farm a better second-day park than Disney’s other Anaheim gate, California Adventure. Sea World in San Diego has largely pivoted to rides, and recently opened its new 150-foot diving coaster named Emperor. For adults with rugrats, is a good option, as is the all-inclusive Great Wolf Lodge amusement center/ indoor water park in Anaheim. And Southern California isn’t our only day-trip option. Phoenix, like Las Vegas, is missing a large outdoor amusement park, but it has two small ones with minor coasters and two water parks. In Salt Lake City, enthusiasts are bullish on the independently owned Lagoon amusement park, populated with 10 legit coasters. I’ve been once, and I’m tempted to return. But a word of warning for you hardcore road-trippers: The six-hour slog through the desolate Sevier Desert may not be worth any thrill machine — no matter its rollergasm potential. MP
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unique coaster rides — a little less than a third of the 10,943 coasters documented at Roller Coaster Data Base. That’s where the coaster habit, despite the low cost of most amusement parks, can deplete one’s savings account. Not for nothing is 50 the average age of ACE’s membership — and that’s only nine years older than the average amusement park attendee, per a 2017 report by PGAV Destinations. Among those polled who went to an amusement park in 2016, half traveled 50 miles or more to do so, which may mean having to cough up for hotel rooms and/ or airfare. Locals can feel that price pinch too. Have you ever tried to hit a few of Las Vegas’ scattershot attractions in an afternoon? The expense rivals dinner at a resort steakhouse. A date night at the one-stop-shop Area 15 can cost more than that day run to Six Flags. Circus Circus’ small indoor theme park, Adventuredome, no longer sells tickets by the ride — it’s a $60 all-access wristband, even if you only want to ride the facility’s two big coasters. And then there are the parking and ancillary fees (say, the elevator to Strat’s SkyPod) you’ll incur before you even plunk down for a ride ticket. For some locals, our amusement infrastructure is only worth using maybe once a year. “August 16 is National Roller Coaster Day,” Gihbsson says. “I go ride and get my picture for the day.”
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Legoland (and its completely immersive resort hotel), just north of San Diego,
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“Awe-inspiring and shiver-worthy!” — DESERET NEWS
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DINO MIGHT VelociCoaster at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas coaster enthusiasts’ greatest complaint is the absence of two amusement parks: the one we briefly had, and the one a city our size should have. MGM Grand Adventures theme park, which Pavlock calls “ahead of its time” (and he’s not alone; see p. 40), was whittled down over time and closed in 2002, right before it reached its 10th anniversary. And we have the thinnest of hopes for Six Flags, Cedar Fair, or a similar company to plant their flag in Las Vegas. “We don’t have a full theme park — I would love that,” says Pavlock, who was once a local attractions operator and is currently an occasional coaster photographer and on-camera expert for the Travel Channel. “If it was designed properly, it would work. But it’ll be hard to get it started because of our climate. You’ll need indoor queues with air conditioning. Maybe a chain could start small and then make the park bigger over time.” As such, our so-called adult Disneyland is leagues away from an actual Disneyland. Until that happens, I’ll keep trekking I-15 with my interstate theme-park visits (see sidebar for regional options). Las Vegas may call itself the City of Entertainment, but until it boasts enough hairpin turns and airtime hills to disorient a stunt pilot, I’ll remain a roller coaster road warrior. ✦
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George Balanchine’s WHO CARES? MUSIC BY GEORGE GERSHWIN CHOREOGRAPHY BY GEORGE BALANCHINE
MAY 20–22, 2022 THE SMITH CENTER
NEVADA BALLET THEATRE (702) 749-2000 • NEVADABALLET.ORG ARTISTS OF BALLET WEST IN NICOLO FONTE’S CARMINA BURANA. PHOTO BY LUKE ISLEY.
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THE PROMISE OF ARRIVAL Recalling the romance of air travel before body scans, COVID anxiety, and (ugh) ‘Sky Bites’ Kris Saknussemm
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is name was Luther Tubbs. Bright lime-green uniform with brighter yellow piping, like the Wizard of Oz in partial disguise — and an even greener green cap with crisp gold braid. He offered a chauffeur service at the Oakland Airport in a green 1958 Lincoln Continental (he was proud that the cabbies hated him). As a kid, I loved to go to the airport with my parents to pick up friends and relatives just to maybe see him, so in business on his own. I loved even more to be hauled out across the Bay to San Francisco International Airport where the kerosene rush of the jet fuel was stronger, and there in the main terminal was a giant wooden jigsaw mosaic with Polynesian and Asian themes, outrigger canoes and Chinatown dragons, Gold Rush pickaxes, sea lions, cable cars, and California missions — a gorgeous, mingled mass welcome to the new American West and Pacific Rim Exotica. I thrilled to watch the clacking names of cities rotate on the big black signs … Hong Kong, Honolulu, Athens, Oslo, Karachi. Even domestic destinations like Detroit and Milwaukee took on an air of enigma and wonder. (The idea that I might one day go to Cincinnati was then a source of awe and not dismay. Imagine that.) Everything about airports electrified me, from the first moment I could go to a public restroom unchaperoned. I savored the different psychic auras of departure and arrival surrounding all the strangers
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I somehow felt I knew. Sorrow. Longing. Hope. Solitary excitement. Communal celebration. Uncertainty. Necessity. And that mysteriously intuited but still foreign adult relief of those glad to be departing with just a Bloody Mary at a lounge bar to see them off. At age 8, I wrote down in a small Carnival notebook the first overheard line of my writing life: “We’re only here to say goodbye to people.” My first actual air travel experience found me wiggling in polyester ecstasy. It was far too short a flight to Burbank, California — but I hit that never-forgotten high of First Stewardess Adoration. I spiraled like a chain of suitcases out of a DC-10 for Jackie. Even prettier than my third-grade teacher, she wore a uniform like I’d never seen before. Her tight blue waist-cut jacket and skirt (and that hat) truly suited her (maybe the first moment I can remember where such symbolic authority seemed purely reassuring and not intimidating — and genuine, as in deserved). I held my breath as she took me by my right hand and led me to the cockpit to meet the pilot and crew. She pinned silver wings to my striped shirt and gave me extra pretzels and a Fanta grape drink (my favorite then). I wanted to live with her forever, in our own airplane, where she’d be served, and we’d never land. Thousands of air miles later, memorable moments and crises: an engine catching fire out of Heathrow; landing in Shanghai after midnight on the first day of Chinese New Year; getting a ride on the mobile stair
unit to the closed door of a running plane in Reykjavik (what a learning experience); the sheer design intensity of Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur’s airports; just the thought of Cairo or Mexico City’s bazaar cacophony; witnessing a sleek-suited man from Delhi buying a Nigerian woman a $150,000 Cartier watch in Dubai at dawn; LAX and Kennedy over and over (how can anyone not delight in Jamaicans landing in Queens in tropical regalia despite the sleet?). Oh, yes, mate. Something special about Qantas passengers upchucking for hours across the blind Pacific … or taking off in a black-eye cyclone from the Isle of Pines while sending up a huge rooster tail of rain down the runway lined with rebel forces, the wind-shear shudder like the end of the world. And, of course, the little matter of a twin-engine emergency crash landing in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Hard to forget when the rescue team carries black palmwood spears. But there’s also that first fabulous time flying into Vegas at night. Sooo worth a window seat: The sheer symphonic transition from utter high desert mountain dark to the sudden shapeshifting mirage of the ultimate Boom Town — night-blooming oasis of impossible possibility. (And they call Paris the City of Light!) In my personal flight log, I’d place that right up there with the Cathay Pacific upgrade to first class from the Philippines to Singapore, sipping a real Bordeaux and lis-
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tening to Yo-Yo Ma on custom headphones, dining on stir-fry beef and mushrooms in oyster sauce, the jungles of Vietnam almost innocent below. For those of a certain vintage, even defunct airlines hold a special fondness. Who in the know doesn’t miss Pan-Am, PSA, and TWA? Hughes Airwest and People Express? Of all the lost airlines, though, Western Airlines wins the prize for memorable campaign lines: “The ohhhnly way to fly.” I don’t think the infamous skyjackings of the ’70s, the tragedy of 9/11 and its consequences, the ghostly conundrum of MH370, increasingly extreme weather, or the on-going COVID obstacles of recent times — or any one event or development — is the root of the lost glamour and charm of commercial airline flight. There’s a pattern that follows the cost-cutting mandates of free-market efficiency: Less legroom, thinner blankets, no blankets. Carry-on luggage rules, plastic cutlery, plastic food. And let’s not forget problems at the hard metal and industrial end, with accelerated airplane production times, union stresses, training and skills shortages. Maybe air travel is simply more magic than we can economically, culturally, and environmentally sustain. As a pilot friend of mine says somewhat cryptically, “Only so many pigs can fly.” But while some of us may justifiably lament a vanishing era of at least potentially democratic air travel (with a modicum of convenience and basic corporate goodwill), I keep two things in mind as a tonic to the pining nostalgia. One, I check out Greyhound Bus depots in U.S. cities I visit. I spent a lot of time in Greyhound stations growing up. They have plenty of cultural mystique and heritage — just not easily romanticized — and they speak to class and racial divides Americans aren’t keen to dwell on. Secondly, I consider the history of aviation, and how so many of the aeronautical and engineering innovations emerged from military applications. War. Still, even when I do my best to put the realities of air travel today into a larger perspective, I get frustrated fumbling with the chintzy bags of Sky Bites (“a savory mix”), wide-body bodies in increasingly narrow seats, and people trying to ram elephant-sized suitcases into the overhead compartments. I drift back in my mind to Jackie and those silver wings. We will soon be arriving … the local time is … Remind me what the time is? We all hope for the promise of arrival, not merely the fact of departure. ✦
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Optum endowment helps address local doctor shortage A foundation of excellence In 1972, Dr. Tony Marlon came to Las Vegas, establishing a practice that would later become Sierra Health Services, the predecessor to what is now Optum and Southwest Medical. Recently, Optum, working with the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, established the Optum Dr. Tony and Renee Marlon Endowed Chair in the Department of Orthopaedics, with a pledge of more than $1.2 million over five years. Dr. and Mrs. Marlon generously donated a match to those funds, for a total donation to the school of $2.5 million.
Meeting a critical need Many of the school’s students want to specialize in orthopaedic surgery. However, southern Nevada rarely has enough residency spots to provide graduate-level training, and students would have to leave the state to complete their residencies. Now, more UNLV medical students can receive excellent training here, and, upon finishing their residencies, may decide to stay here, helping ease the local doctor shortage.
Optum physicians doing their part
and as chair, will guide the program through further growth. Optum Care Orthopaedics and Spine has played an important part, and relied on the support, participation, and feedback of physician colleagues including Dr. Sukanta Maitra, Dr. Brock Wentz, and Dr. Erik Kubiak.
The medical school’s impact This public-private partnership is the first endowment chair for the school, and it will be instrumental in supporting and promoting the department of orthopaedics, as well as orthopaedic education and research in Nevada. The school has many excellent residency programs that supply our community with well-trained physicians. Optum and its team members believe we all deserve quality health care delivered right here at home, and our medical education system is the key. Supporting and improving the health care education system in Nevada improves the health care system overall.
To learn more, visit oc-orthopaedic.com
Dr. Michael Daubs, medical director of Optum Care Orthopaedics and Spine, is the recipient of the first endowed chair. Dr. Daubs designed and launched the school’s orthopaedic surgery residency program,
Optum Care Orthopaedics and Spine medical director, Michael Daubs, MD, with graduates from inaugural class, Tyler Kent, MD; Brandon Romero, MD; Aaron Gray, MD, PhD; and Sean Davis, MD; and UNLV Orthopaedic Residency Program director, Brock Wentz, MD. The Optum Dr. Tony & Renee Marlon Endowment will help fund training of future orthopaedic specialists.
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HEALTHY LIVING By Elisabeth Daniels
A focus on wellness represents a commitment to taking care of ourselves. Because wellness encompasses a range of elements— from eating well and exercising, to preventative medical care, to treating chronic medical conditions to avert complications, to prayer, meditation and mindfulness, to just being outside and connecting with nature— it can be hard to wrap your head around. Add to that the constant temptation to make unhealthy choices, achieving your wellness goals can feel nearly impossible. Be patient with yourself. It can take up to six weeks to make a behavior change a habit. Keep at it. The more you work on changing, the more likely you’ll succeed. The benefits of achieving wellness—a healthy, capable body, a strong social circle, low stress, and a purpose you’re passionate about—are well worth the effort. Our guide and second part of our Healthy Living series should make it easier.
WELLNESS AT WORK
Sitting all day. Pizza Fridays. Weekly birthday celebrations with lots of cake. Squabbles with coworkers. Work can be a wellness minefield. If changing jobs or investing in a treadmill desk are too drastic, we’ve got practical strategies for staying healthy at work without changing your daily routine. Take the stairs instead of the elevator Set hydration goals each day Schedule reminders to take breaks
Give coworkers a genuine smile Treat yourself to a healthy snack Take a walk around the building Devote time to stretching
WELLNESS AT HOME
After a long day at work or ferrying the kids to all their after-school obligations, it can be easy to turn to fast food for dinner or chill out in front of the television all night. Here are a few simple ways to stay healthy at home. Stock your kitchen with whole foods and basic ingredients so you can easily cook healthy meals at home. Create a soothing environment. Light your favorite scented candles or put on a relaxing playlist. Add some greenery. Indoor plants are natural air purifiers, absorbing toxins and releasing oxygen into the air. Go for a walk after dinner. Consider journaling to record important happenings and release any negative emotions that might have cropped during the day.
WELLNESS ON THE ROAD
Adventure. Discovering something new around the next bend. Reconnecting with family and friends. Traveling can be a life-changing experience. But it can also be synonymous with bad food, tight muscles, lack of sleep, and more.
Try these tips to keep rolling with your healthy objectives on your next excursion. Plan ahead. Bring shelf-stable, healthy snacks for the plane and stash some in your purse for those times when you’re between meals and starving. Pack walking shoes for impromptu strolls. Keep calories in check. If the menu option is something you could easily have at home, select something lighter. That way, when you come across regional dishes that you can’t get anywhere else you can dig in guilt-free. Staying at a hotel? Take advantage of the gym or pool or take a class at a local fitness studio. Even better, explore your new location on foot. Fill up on protein and vegetables and limit drinking your calories by minimizing your intake of sugary soft drinks and alcoholic beverages. Practice mindfulness. Don’t stress yourself out by trying to capture every moment in photos or video. Be in the moment. Look into supplements that strengthen your immune system to avoid being wiped out by a cold or other ailment.
WELLNESS WITH FRIENDS
Strong friendships are good for your health. Friends are there to celebrate the happy times and to help you cope during the tough times. They foster a sense of belonging and prevent A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 2
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YOUR WELLNESS BLUEPRINT
Get going on your way to wellness with these tips. Pencil It In. Grab a pad of paper or an app and list your wellness goals. Think about the challenges you face. Figure out where you want to be in six months, one year, five years. Based on your needs and desires, plus what you’ve learned about wellness, determine specific, measurable goals to achieve your vision. Wreck the Roadblocks. List the barriers that keep you from living your best wellness life. Which ones are genuine obstacles? Which ones are just excuses? Think of ways to work around these problems and develop solutions so you can overcome them when these issues come up. Keep forgetting your gym bag? Stash extra workout clothes in your desk. Tempted by leftover pizza in the breakroom? Meal prep on the weekends so you can easily grab a healthy meal when you’re on the go.
loneliness. Many times they encourage you to stick to your wellness goals. But sometimes, when their goals are different from yours, you can get derailed. In those circumstances, it can be a little uncomfortable to be the person who votes for salads over burgers at girls’ night or who skips happy hours in favor of gym sessions. Cultivate friends who respect your priorities. Here are a few suggestions for having fun with your friends while staying on track. Plan ahead. Eat a snack before happy hour if your goal is to stay away from the bar appetizers. Bring veggies or a salad to potluck dinners. Sneak in home-popped popcorn on a movie date. Find other things to do together. Get together with your friends in places where food and alcohol isn’t the primary focus. Visit a museum, have a spa day, go for a mani/pedi together, volunteer for a charity event, or make a hiking date. There are plenty of ways to connect with your friends outside of the usual bars and restaurants. Don’t give in to peer pressure. Don’t let your friends talk you into eating or drinking things you don’t want to. It’s okay to stick to your wellness goals.
Plan to Succeed. Success often hinges on having a plan, especially when you’re tackling something major. Develop a strategy for yourself and your goals; otherwise, life will get in the way, and angst will set in. Develop a game plan for achieving your goals, and don’t forget to include tactics for overcoming the hurdles. Your plan should have specific steps for reaching your goals but be flexible so you can adjust as life unfolds. Stay Accountable. Share your goals with friends, family or a wellness partner. If they know about your goals, the people around you can help you achieve them. Make sure it’s someone you trust and enjoy spending time with. Maybe you can keep each other going. Jot in a Journal. Wellness isn’t always easy, so give yourself a place to unload, like a journal. Venting can help you move past obstacles, and sometimes solutions present themselves through the process of journaling. Start Where You Are. Don’t wait for the circumstances to be right to begin. There’s no perfect time for wellness. Where are you right now on your path? Embrace where you are in this moment and where you want to be and start the process. When issues pop up, refer to your plan or journal those feelings and concerns. One Thing at a Time. Achieving your wellness goals doesn’t happen overnight. There are so many areas to work on that it can be overwhelming. Focus on one thing at a time. Keep working at it and you’ll get there. But remember, wellness is a practice. It’s a journey, not a destination. Don’t Fight Failure. Setbacks are going to happen. Making mistakes is part of the process. Learn what you can from them, and use any failures to strengthen your plan. Ditch the Comparisonitis. We’re bombarded by messaging telling us how to get the “perfect” body or which diet plan to follow or how to live our best lives. These messages leave us feeling behind, and they distract us from our goals. By tuning into the specifics of your body and lifestyle, you can cut out the noise and concentrate on the initiatives that work for you. Celebrate the Milestones. No matter how small your accomplishments may seem, reward yourself for a job well done.
GET OUTSIDE ... There is an abundance of places to exercise outside—for a walk, a hike, a yoga session, or any of your other favorite ways to workout. RED ROCK CANYON Thirty minutes west of Las Vegas, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area offers thousands of acres of striking rock formations and canyons to explore. Opportunities to hike, bike, rock climb, and watch wildlife
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abound. Get a feel for the area with driving the 13-mile scenic loop. Stop by the Visitor Center for information on the towering cliffs of colorful sandstone, limestone Indian roasting pits, and pictographs. Bring a snack and refuel after your workout at a selection of outdoor picnic areas. SUNSET PARK Sunset Park is one the largest parks in Clark
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County and has everything an outdoor enthusiast might want. There are picnic areas with barbecues, nine softball fields, two Little League fields, eight basketball courts, five playgrounds, several miles of walk paths, fitness course, splash pad, disc golf course, dog park, pond, RC boat ramp, seven sand volleyball courts, and eight lighted tennis courts. WETLANDS PARK For walking and biking trails, wildlife viewing, photography opportunities, and spots
for quiet contemplation in a unique natural environment, head to Wetlands Park. The park, located on the east side of the Valley, includes 2,900 acres along the Las Vegas Wash, which send more than 185 million gallons of water daily to Lake Mead. After your workout, visit the kid-friendly Nature Center which is open from 9 to 4 every day except major holidays. MOUNT CHARLESTON When you want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, head 35
miles northwest to Mount Charleston. Nevada’s eighth-highest mountain peak, Mount Charleston is part of the Spring Mountain Range and Toiyabe National Forest. Ranging from 3,000 to 12,000 feet in elevation, Mount Charleston features 52 miles of hiking trails, lined with trees like juniper, mountain mahogany, Aspen and Ponderosa pine. Another perk of exercising at Mount Charleston? You might see wild burros, songbirds, deer or desert tortoises during your visit.
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With their dedication, discipline, and determination, these athletes are talents to watch photography
SABIN ORR
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AALIYAH GAYLES BASKETBALL
The 5-foot-9 Gayles will play for USC in the fall and study kinesiology, learning the science behind the explosive athleticism she brings to the court. Four years ago, when Gayles was a small-framed freshman, the Grizzlies were leading a tournament title game. A strong opponent, Alissa Pili, began attacking the basket and posing the only real threat. “She was a force to be reckoned with,” coach Billy Hemberger recalls. “And Aaliyah said, ‘Coach, I got it.’ In my mind, I was like, ‘You’re skin and bones. How?’ But she fought like hell to find a way to make us win. Accepting that challenge at such a young age was unique.”
THE PROSPECTS: THE BUZZ: Eighth in ESPN’s HoopGurlz national recruiting rankings and named to the McDonald’s All-American team, senior point guard Gayles led Spring Valley High School in points, assists, and steals to propel the Grizzlies to a 14-8 record and the state semifinals.
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Gayles, now 18, remembers being surprised that she got the tough assignment. “I wasn’t scared at all. It was just another opponent,” she says. Gayles clung to Pili, and when Pili fouled out, the Grizzlies coasted to a win. “Sorry!” Gayles curtly concludes, hinting at a fierce competitive nature. “She is unique in that she does everything,” Hemberger says. “Her athleticism is out of control. That’s what everybody loves immediately about her. … And statistically, she fills everything up with points, rebounds, steals, assists.” Gayles always had the ability to go from zero to 60 in no time, but her hard work to become a better shooter has paid off. Stopping Gay-
les is most teams’ top priority. “She will use that to be able to use herself as a decoy to get her teammates going,” her coach says. “Then when her teammates are going, she starts creating for herself.” Inspired by her father and late grandfather to play and get better, Gayles says she needs to tighten her ball handling and be more consistent with the three-point shot at the next level. Being closer to family she doesn’t see often in Southern California and the nurturing atmosphere at USC guided Gayles’ decision to go there. “It’s a big support system there,” she says. “They’re more than just coaches. They’re like family. They take good care of you — especially the teammates I’m already close with,” including that player she guarded four years ago, Alissa Pili. From the start, Hemberger has witnessed Gayles’ keen loyalty to team, family, and school. “She does it for people. She doesn’t want to let people down, especially those that are in her corner day in and day out,” he says. She agrees: “I’ll do something for you before I do something for myself.” Paul Szydelko
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CHAMPIONS ON THE RISE THE BUZZ: Kuwata may be less of a household name than Erica Sullivan and Katie Grimes, who went to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (and brought home a silver medal and fourth place, respectively), but, she trains alongside them with the Sandpipers of Nevada and is a member of USA Swimming’s Junior National Team. Kuwata also went to the 2020 Olympic trials and missed qualifying for the U.S. team by just two spots.
SWIMMING
A high school senior, Kuwata has committed to the University of Louisville, a school with a solid swim team that’s been getting consistently better under the guidance of head coach Arthur Albiero, according to Sandpipers coach Jake Des Roches. Kuwata says she picked Louisville, of all the schools recruiting her, during an unofficial visit in 2019. “They felt like more of a family than just a swim team,” she says. “That was important to me, to find people that I could trust and knew I would get along with.” Swimming is physically taxing for anyone, but even more so for Kuwata, whose specialty of long-distance events is partly because of her height. At 5-foot-2, she’s at a competitive disadvantage in shorter-distance races, where the length of a body stretching for a touch pad can mean a difference of split seconds — fractions that
THE PROSPECTS:
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separate winners and losers. Over greater distances, with longer times, that advantage dwindles, but Kuwata still has to make extra effort. “She’s what we call a high-tempo swimmer who, in order to go the same speed as someone taller than her, has to take more strokes,” Des Roches says. “So, even though she’s in the long-distance races, it looks like she’s sprinting. She’s a really good kicker, with excellent legs.” Getting up at 4:30 a.m. to train in a cold pool requires resolve. What keeps Kuwata going? Her goals, she says. She’s looking to make the open-water national team this month (April), meaning she’d have to be in the top six competitors in a 10k race. “Right now, I’m focusing on a World Junior trip (the Championships in Open Water Swimming in Seychelles off East Africa, in September), which is what I’m
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trying to qualify for,” she says, “as well as just contributing to my college team.” Determination is Kuwata’s defining characteristic. Asked to give an example, she tells this story: “Back in May 2019, I was at a competition out of town. I woke up, got out of bed, and had a seizure. I had a roommate with me, and one of the chaperones is a firefighter. So, he helped me through it. When I woke up, the race had started, so I knew I wasn’t going to swim that day, which was hard. But luckily, I had two other races that weekend. I didn’t know what it felt like to have a seizure; that was my first one. (The next day) my body was in a lot of pain. My head was still pretty foggy. But I told myself, ‘I’m going to do this.’ So, I swam a 5k that day and came in seventh. I don’t know what went through my head when I decided I was going to swim, because honestly that’s kind of a lot. And then I did another one the day after …” Soon after, Kuwata was diagnosed as epileptic, a condition she says she neither wants to avoid talking about — for fear of perpetuating the stigma around it — nor let define her. “It’s certainly scary, as a coach, to see a kid you care about have that happen,” Des Roches says. “But the most important thing is, we’re not going to coach her any differently because of this. We just have to be aware of this and know how to protect her if something does happen. She’s still the same swimmer as she was before. She’s still the same kid.” And that kid is a warrior and a role model, he adds. “Paige always wants to be competing and racing — even in practices, she has the attitude of not just working hard but wanting to win. It’s a positive influence on the younger kids.” Heidi Kyser
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NICHOLAS CANDELA FENCING
THE BUZZ: Currently the sixth-ranked fencer in the United States for his age group (20 and under), Candela is a member of Battle Born Fencing Club and represents himself on the United States National Team.
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THE PROSPECTS: Now a senior at Bishop Gorman High School, Candela has committed to the University of Notre Dame. But last year, he was on the verge of calling it quits. After years of toiling under the fluorescent lights of Battle Born Fencing Club, Candela looked down the aisle at his opponent for what he thought would be the last time. It was USA Fencing’s July Challenge, one of the last marquee events during the college recruiting live period — and his last chance to prove to himself and to college coaches that he belonged on the Division 1 stage. Back then, he was ranked outside of the top 50, and no one, not even his club coaches, believed he’d be able to take on a field that included national champions, Junior World medalists, and recruits from powerhouses such as Princeton and Columbia. Despite the odds
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stacked against him, Candela set the tournament on fire, placing third out of 218 of the best fencers in the country. It was enough of a performance to land him an offer from Notre Dame, launching a career that would eventually take him all the way to the International Fencing Federation Team World Cup in Belgrade, Serbia. Candela always knew he had the talent to go far in the sport. “A month before I got my first national medal, my coach was going to have a talk with me about pursuing fencing as a recreational thing,” says the 18-year-old. “The second-to-last-tournament I had done pretty poorly, and my coach had asked me, ‘How did you feel about that last tournament?’ And I told him, ‘I really feel like I’m right on the edge.’ After I told him, he kind of shut his mouth, and I got third at the next tournament.”
His coach, Walter Dragonetti, is certainly a believer now. “Nick has all the skills and tools that embody a champion fencer,” Dragonetti says. “His aggressive style and speed tempered with just the right amount of patience leaves his opponents confused and bewildered.” It’s those skills and tools — and Candela’s persistence and confidence — that launched him from an unknown fencing prospect to a fixture on fencing’s world stage. As of today, Candela is the sixthranked fencer in the United States for his age group, and he hopes to climb to the top of the international and domestic rankings. This newfound success has motivated Candela to take fencing as far as he possibly can. “(I used to) feel it was just a way to get into college,” he says. “It’s definitely changed now that I’ve gotten more results. Up until last year, I was ranked 50- or 60-something, and I didn’t have any recruitment offers. But now fencing at the Olympic level is a real possibility for me. I’m just going to see how it goes and keep performing well in college. If there’s an opportunity that I can train toward, then 100 percent of the time I’ll take that opportunity.” Ganny Belloni
CHAMPIONS ON THE RISE
THE BUZZ: As a freshman, on her first touch for Liberty High School’s varsity flag football team this season, Mitchell sprinted 60 yards for a touchdown, eliciting “Oohs!” and “Ahs!” from spectators. She also played for the Lady Apex Predators in National Youth Sports (NYS) Nevada and the 15-and-under Girls USA Flag Football team.
THE PROSPECTS: In addition to
refining her gridiron skills, the 15-year-old Mitchell is competing in 100-, 200-, and 400-meter sprints, hoping to earn a college scholarship in either track or flag football. Mitchell began running for the Zephyrs Track Club in a Chicago suburb when she was seven years old and continued in NYS when her family moved to Las Vegas three years later. She shocked her mom, Traci, when she asked about football after watching the NFL on TV and her little brother, Trenton, play. She knew nothing about foot-
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ball, but coach Troy Smidt of the all-girls Lady Lions taught her the fundamentals. Mitchell excelled both with her quick feet and soft hands for receiving. Playing against boys, she was named the league’s most valuable player, and her team won the NYS Super Bowl in 2018. “She’s always wanted to be the best in everything,” her mother Traci says. “She wants to beat herself, not necessarily anyone else.” Liberty High coach Jerry Fewer knew Mitchell’s reputation before she arrived on campus, and she exceeded expectations transitioning from 5-on-5 play with no contact to 7-on-7 with some blocking contact
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on a larger field. “She lets her talent do everything for her,” he says. “She stops on a dime and goes back with no problem. Her speed is unbelievable.” A durable, elusive 5-foot-4, Mitchell finds blockers, crisply adjusts, and accelerates into the open. When she burst through to score on that first play, Fewer and his defensive coach (who’s also his daughter) looked at each other, and, he says, “She’s like, ‘Holy crap.’” Mitchell says that being able to read the field and see where to take the ball is among her strengths. “When I am playing, my adrenaline is high!” she says. “All I can think about is scoring and accomplishing my goal of three touchdowns per game. I think about doing what I can to contribute. I try not to let the other the team score, whether it be pulling flags or getting an interception.” Improving her footwork, getting faster at agility ladder drills, sprinting to wins on the track and maintaining a strong GPA are among her goals. Her favorite subject so far in high school is math, just as well to calculate her rapidly accumulating statistics — 3,269 yards from scrimmage, 33 touchdowns and 115 tackles — leading Liberty High to a 21-4 record and the 4A state championship. Paul Szydelko
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We Trippin’
Hit the road to these three destinations with your SO, kids, grandma, and whoever else loves a good weekend adventure! By KRISTEN KIDMAN
My family doesn’t do well sitting in one place for long. I fell in love with my husband’s zest for spontaneous weekend road trips, and that didn’t change once our son Kaden, now 8, was born. Whether it’s loading up the RV with way
more food and clothes than we’ll ever use in one weekend or jumping in the car and heading out to a cool trail we just heard about, we’re always looking for fun places to introduce our son to. Here are a few of our favorites.
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PRO TIPS:
Last year, when the kids were in distance learning, some friends and I had the brilliant idea: “Wouldn’t it be great if they were doing their class, but in a prettier setting than the houses they’ve been stuck in for months?” So, we took our little bubble to Sedona for 10 days, and it was an absolute blast. The kids did their classes in the morning and ventured out in the afternoon. I could write for days about the activities available for families, but if you only have a weekend, here are three must-dos.
TUBE THE VERDE RIVER
Sedona Adventure Tubing Madness at Alcantara Vineyard is our favorite pre-Sedona adventure. The crew shuttles everyone to the drop-off point, then you leisurely float down the river. The trip takes up to three hours, and it’s the perfect way to disconnect from screens and connect with your loved ones.
Bring a floating cooler. You can rent one from Sedona Adventure Tubing Madness or purchase your own. The tubes are roomy, but keeping drinks and snacks dry in their own space is a plus. Speaking of snacks … Don’t be me and think grocery store sushi is a fantastic river snack. Kids got it all over the tube, two people got stomach aches — it wasn’t pretty. Bring sunscreen. Also not pretty? Sunburn. Be ready for waves of calm punctuated by bursts of adrenaline. The river has parts where the water is nearly still. Then, things will speed up and you hold on for the ride. The tubes have water shooters for entertainment during down time. A waterproof speaker is also a good idea. During one lull, we sang the entire Hamilton soundtrack. You’re welcome, other tubers!
KADEN’S
Have a drink at REVIEW Alcantara Vineyard. “Kids should It’s family-friendly, go to the twisty-road and there’s often live town (Jerome) music. Call me lucky, for ice cream, but my kid is perfectly because the happy snacking on ice cream is a charcuterie board really, really while we enjoy a glass good.” of wine. Sedona Adventure Tours, sedonaadventuretours.com
TAKE A LEAP AT SLIDE ROCK STATE PARK
Mother Nature’s ultimate water park is in Oak Creek Canyon. The area was developed into an apple orchard more than 100 years ago; you can still see some of the original cabins and equipment there today. There are multiple natural pools and “water slides” created in the rock formations. The biggest is 80 feet long. Daunting … but even nervous explorers like me can handle it. PRO TIPS:
Arrive early. I’ve shown up more than an hour before the park officially opens, and there’s already a decent-sized line. Note: The park closes at capacity. Bring water shoes. The rocks are very slippery. (Ask my husband, who has a permanent scar on his forehead after biffing it!) Bring water, snacks, and lunches. A gift shop and restrooms are near the park’s entrance, but it’s a long walk back, so hit them when you see them! Slide Rock State Park, azstateparks.com/ slide-rock/
HAVE LUNCH AT RAINBOW TROUT FARM
Slide Rock State Park
Rainbow Trout Farm is a fantastic twofor-one. You get an activity to entertain the kids and a family-friendly lunch spot. Everyone gets a pole, bait, net, and access to the trout pond. Once you’ve successfully caught a keeper, the staff will prepare it for you to grill, then give you seasonings and butter. Pick your barbecue, season your fish, grill for a few minutes on each side, and be prepared for an extremely fresh fish lunch! PRO TIPS:
Rainbow Trout Farm
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Be patient. I’ve caught a fish in five minutes here. But! I’ve also waited more than an hour, singing fish songs, bribing, googling fish catching tips. These fish are sneaky! Have that “circle of life” talk in advance if your child is sensitive like mine. Kaden loved the thrill of catching a fish. He didn’t D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
S L I D E R O C K C O U R T E S Y O F A R I Z O N A S TAT E PA R K S A N D T R A I L S ; F I S H I N G C O U R T E S Y O F R A I N B OW T R O U T FA R M ; Z I P L I N E C O U R T E S Y O F B R I A N H E A D R E S O R T ; P I R A T E B O A T C O U R T E S Y O F R O C K Y P O I N T B O A T D O C K ; F A M I LY P H O T O S : K R I S T E N K I D M A N
SEDONA, ARIZONA
Just a heads up, kids have to be at least 5 years old and 40 inches tall to participate.
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Zipline at Brian Head Ski Resort Boulder Bay Park
love that we were eating it and felt a little bad. His friends, on the other hand, loved eating something they caught themselves. Again, snacks. If fish isn’t your thing, there’s food for purchase. I also brought a Lunchable for Kaden, because I never know which days his entire taste palate is going to change. Sedona Rainbow Trout Farm, sedonarainbowtroutfarm.com
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Pirate boat at Panguitch Lake
SEDONA HONORABLE MENTIONS
Cathedral Rock Hike, where Kaden thought he gained superpowers from the vortexes. Tlaquepaque Arts & Crafts Village, with a great toy store, multiple crystal shops for your budding geologist, and one of my favorite Mexican Restaurants, El Rincon. Jerome, a ghost town well worth the 40-mile drive out of Sedona because of its quirky shops, supernatural tours, and meal with a view at the Haunted Hamburger.
BRIAN HEAD, UTAH (AND ENVIRONS)
Brian Head is a little more than three hours from Las Vegas, but feel free to take your time getting there with stops in Mesquite,
St. George, and Cedar City. Boasting “the greatest snow on Earth” and endless outdoor adventures, Brian Head and the surrounding areas are where we go for a cool escape in the summer and a wonderland in the winter. When we say, “Brian Head,” we mean a bunch of spots in and around the actual town. Here are a few of our favorite things to do:
GET OUTDOORS AT BRIAN HEAD RESORT
It’s your all-in-one stop for adventure all year round. Snow sports enthusiasts will find skiing, snowboarding, and tubing, and during warmer months, there’s hiking, mountain biking, braving ziplines, and climbing walls.
Get a ski lift pass even if you aren’t in a sporting mood. The kids in our group (and frankly the adults) were too nervous to do some of the summer sports on our last trip. But we did enjoy the relaxing ride up the mountain on the ski lift. Bonus: There are few complaints when you hike downhill the whole way after your ride! Take chains for your vehicle. Odd concept for us desert-dwellers, I know. Kick back with a burger and beer at Last Chair Grill and Brews. You might catch some live music, and it’s a fun, family-friendly option. Brian Head Ski Resort, brianhead.com
RENT A PIRATE BOAT AT PANGUITCH LAKE
Panguitch Lake is 20 minutes away from Brian Head Resort. It’s a wonderful spot for camping, fishing, horseback riding, and boating. But if you want the memories, the screams of excitement from the kids, and the pics for the Gram, rent a pirate boat. Rocky Point Boat Dock has one that turns all the heads on
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activities, and plenty of camping and cabin options are available. Off-road trail rides. There’s a number of trails to explore. Don’t have a truck or ATV? You can rent one at Brian Head Outdoor Adventures.
BIG BEAR LAKE, CALIFORNIA
I fell in love with Big Bear Lake when I did some videography work for a children’s summer camp there. I spent a week swimming, horseback riding, rock climbing, and bobsledding. I had to share the good news of Big Bear with my loved ones, so on the drive home I called my husband and a few friends, and we booked an Airbnb for the following weekend! You need at least three days there because there’s so much to do.
KADEN’S REVIEW “Kids should go to Panguitch Lake because they might see some fish. They should go ride boats and they should go hiking, because it’s fun.”
the lake. My kid and his friends went absolutely bonkers playing pirates all day. (He still gushes about it two years later.) PRO TIPS:
Get fishing licenses. They’re required for anyone over 12 years old. If you forget, as I often do, they’re pretty easy to get online. Check the map. Panguitch Lake is not in the town of Panguitch, but about 30 minutes away. The first time we went there, I assumed it was the same thing, making for a grumpy morning. Bring your pirate pup. They’re allowed on the boat, provided they’re leashed. Rocky Point Boat Dock, rockypointboatdock.com
EXPLORE CEDAR BREAKS NATIONAL MONUMENT
Cedar Breaks National Monument is the perfect scenic stop for red rock suckers like my husband and me. There are multiple trails (little hikers might do best on Sunset Trail), stars to gaze at, and wildlife to see. Kaden geeked out learning about the ringtails, badgers, foxes, mountain lions, pikas, and black bears that live there.
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PRO TIPS:
Bring binoculars or a telescope. This area is known for amazing nighttime views. Kaden is a huge fan of the Star Walk app that lets you hold your phone up to the sky, and quickly find out if that extra bright light is a star, planet, or satellite. It also maps out constellations. Arrive early. If you want to camp, you can try your luck at Point Supreme Campground, which is first come, first serve. It’s open midJune to mid-September and accommodates both tents and RVs. Keep in mind, even in summer months, temperatures can drop to 30 degrees at night. Ski and snowshoe. This is your chance to try snow sports in a wilderness setting. For us desert dwellers who are intimidated by snowshoes, guided tours are offered. Also, this 90-minute activity is better suited for older kids and teens. Cedar Breaks National Monument, nps. gov/cebr/index.htm
BRIAN HEAD AND ENVIRONS HONORABLE MENTIONS
Brian Head Winter Sports School, where kids as young as 3 can learn to ski and snowboard from the pros. Reservations are strongly recommended. Duck Creek Village is just 40 minutes away from Brian Head and well worth the drive. A quaint village, numerous outdoor
ALPINE SLIDE AT MAGIC MOUNTAIN RECREATION AREA
Open year-round, this is your chance to race down the mountain in a bobsled, while taking in the incredible views of the lake. You can also ride go-carts, play mini-golf, and snow-tube or slide down a water slide depending on when you go. PRO TIPS:
Check out the minimum height requirements. Kids have to be at least 36 inches tall to ride with an adult for most of the attractions, and 42 inches to ride on their own. Take the easy road. If roller coasters or heights make you queasy, you can still take the Alpine Slide. You can control the speed of your sled, so you can either race or meander down. Did I mention snacks? You can’t bring your own food in, but there is a café on site with decently priced, kid-friendly options. Big Bear Alpine Slide, alpineslidebigbear.com
SHOP AT THE VILLAGE IN BIG BEAR LAKE
There’s a point in every trip where the kids turn into a Bernie Sanders meme: “I am once again asking to go souvenir shopping.” The Village doesn’t disappoint with multiple bear-themed shops to stroll through and craft vendors offering unique art. PRO TIPS:
Relax. There isn’t a bad time of the year D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
C E D A R B R E A K S C O U R T E S Y O F N AT I O N A L PA R K S S E R V I C E ; A L P I N E S L I D E C O U R T E S Y O F A L P I N E S L I D E AT M AG I C M O U N TA I N ; B O U L D E R B A Y : S H U T T E R S T O C K / G A B R I E L P M A G A N A ; F A M I LY P H O T O S : K R I S T E N K I D M A N
Cedar Breaks National Monument
D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S
Alpine Slide at Magic Mountain Recreation Area
Boulder Bay Park
KADEN’S REVIEW “Go July 4th for the beautiful fireworks. And watch out for the earthquakes!” (We happened to be there when a big earthquake hit California. The kids are still talking about it three years later).
to visit the Village. You’ll experience colorful blooms and cool walking temperatures in the spring and summer, red and orange foliage in the fall, and a snowy wonderland in winter. Stop at Santa Land. If you and the kids have the holiday spirit year-round, you’ll enjoy exploring the historical and pop culture exhibits about Saint Nick.
Eat at Saucy Mama’s Pizzeria. My fellow mom-friends and I went for the name, stayed for the food. This place is popular, so put your name down at least an hour before you want to eat, then hit a bunch of shops while you’re waiting. Big Bear Village, bigbear.com/thingsto-do/the-village/
SWIM AT BOULDER BAY PARK
We assumed there’d be beaches and places to swim all around Big Bear. So, instead of looking it up, we told the kids to yell if they
saw people swimming as we drove around the lake. That’s how we ended up at Boulder Bay Park. It’s a great area to set up a picnic, set out in a kayak, fish, and of course, swim! PRO TIPS:
Arrive early on weekends or holidays. Parking is tricky, and so is grabbing that perfect spot on the shore. Like I said, snacks! There are public bathrooms but not a lot of food options in the immediate area, so plan ahead. Bring or rent a kayak or canoe. This is one thing we wished we had, especially as the water got chillier later in the day. The kids were begging to go to the island, and it took all of our energy, will, and patience to get them there via inner tube! And of course, you’ll need life jackets too. Boulder Bay Park, 39080 Big Bear Blvd., Big Bear Lake, CA
BIG BEAR HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Bowling Barn, where you can brush up on your bowling skills and get a good bite to eat. Big Bear Alpine Zoo, a sanctuary for wild animals that can’t be returned to the wild. Ropes Course at Big Bear Snow Play, an attraction that’s open year-round, where the most daring members of your family can climb through 37 obstacles. (Note: Kids must be 42 inches tall to participate.)
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SENSE OF PLACE
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remember driving past Zia Records with my mom on our annual visits to the dentist. “Do you think you can take me to that store?” I’d ask as we zoomed by. “Not today, mija, we have things to do.” This is usually something parents say to give their nagging kid some false reassurance, but I always knew she meant we’d visit eventually. That today finally came one hot summer morning in 2014 during one of our planned outings (yes, my mom and I would actually often spend time together when I wasn’t going through a teenage mood swing or dealing with a supposed life-or-death high school social situation). Never mind that I thought it was uncool to go to a record store accompanied by a parent. It didn’t matter. As I walked into Zia Records that first time, I felt like I The place where I first was approaching the very source and of Cool itself. The first thing heard the sound of the foundation I noticed — the smell — is permanently person I wanted to be etched on my olfactory memory: a blend of old cardboard, plastic, and PVC (you BY Gabriela Rodriguez know, the stuff vinyl records are made of ). The decor could best be described as organized chaos, the store’s shelves and walls cluttered with books, CDs, records, band T-shirts, DVDs, posters, and art. The music playing on the store speakers was a smorgasbord of unfamiliar tunes. I’d try to mentally match songs to the employees, guessing who queued which tune.
ZIA RECORDS
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(The girl with the thick-rimmed glasses and floor-length duster cardigan? Definitely chose the indie alternative pop. And the long-haired guy with the blank expression must’ve been responsible for the droning stoner metal.) On those Zia trips with my mom, I’d spend hours wandering up and down the aisles. I’d always start with the CDs, snake my way through the wooden shelves, and end up at the opposite end of the store, where I’d scour through the movies. I wasn’t just shopping. The Zia Records on Flamingo and Eastern served as a sanctuary for me during my adolescent years in Las Vegas. It’s where I developed my musical identity, and even my personal identity. That’s why my very first purchase was such a big deal. Whatever I chose to buy, it had to be something I’d be proud to carry up to the cashier — something that showed my undeniable good taste. I chose Disintegration, The Cure’s 1989 album. To this day, I take pride in this record. I don’t care if it’s the modern, mass-produced pressing, all shiny and new. It was my first album purchase and it was mine. From there, I began to build my vinyl collection on rock classics: The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath, The Stooges, The Zombies, Cream. Later, I’d try and just wing it when shopping, a gamble in which CDs were the cheaper option. That’s where I picked up music from artists like King Krule, Nouvelle Vague, Mobb Deep, and Alton Ellis. Eventually my mom started throwing me a few bucks (and her car keys) to get me out of the house, knowing exactly where I was going and what her money was going to be spent on. (Luckily, she encouraged my new hobby, and even let me play my CDs in the car with her. She loved The Strokes and The xx; hated Black Flag and La Dispute.) But there was nothing more liberating than plugging my iPod into the aux port of her car and taking off on a solo trip. Returning to the place where I spent so much of my seemingly never-ending free time as a kid doesn’t hit quite the same in adulthood. It’s funny, but when it comes to having to spend my own money on a record these days, it makes me second-guess the purchase. My visits to Zia have dwindled significantly since then, and I’m not ashamed to admit that most of the music I “discover” nowadays is handed to me by an all-knowing digital algorithm. But I still feel a sense of excitement when I walk through Zia’s double doors to aimlessly browse the aisles. I’m not just excited to find a new favorite band or new beloved album; I’m excited to discover something new about myself. ✦ PHOTOGRAPH C hristopher Smith
SOME MOMENTS STAY WITH YOU FOREVER
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