They're the images that I can't imagine myself remembering but am thankful I do.
I was a kindergartner on track break, and instead of going to daycare, I went with my dad to work at Mt. Charleston Elementary every so often.
It's still vivid in my mind, the empty desert and street-level intersections along U.S. 95 in northwest Las Vegas passing by as we rode up to what he called "Ice Station Zebra." I can still remember the streets—Vegas Drive, Lake Mead, Smoke Ranch, and the now-forgotten Ranch House Road. The road up to Kyle Canyon seemed to take forever, miles and miles of desert with a couple houses scattered about in the orange glow of the rising Mojave Desert sun.
Since those days, Las Vegas' piney mountain island has held a special meaning for me. My last real hike was as a 12-year-old to the peak of the mountain. I learned to ski up there. It's at once a reminder of the stark beauty of our desert and what life's like in other climates, the scent of the ponderosas filling the air.
When I was a child, it was a pristine place. But it's been well-documented what time and growth have done to the place. People bury their garbage under the snow because snow makes it disappear. Residents are under a barrage of classless daytrippers looking for a restroom, a picnic spot or just a place to hang out. The mountain has been overburdened.
Of course, it's not just Mount Charleston that's been assaulted. Red Rock has steadily gotten more crowded. A picnic spot on a Sunday at Lake Mead is almost as rare as water in the reservoir. Junk is even starting to pile up at Mountain Springs Summit on Mount Potosi and at Valley of Fire.
It's hard to blame people for wanting to get out of town. The places are easy to get to and provide a total contrast from the city, an easy, cheap and fun place to have a family outing. Often, facilities are better at our nearby national treasures than at neighborhood parks, which were long ago overcrowded.
Ideas have started floating about what to do about Mount Charleston and its growing filth. There's been talk of adding a day-use fee or simply increasing the police presence up there.
A poor tax and more rangers are the best answers we can come up with?
Maybe the answer is to go back to our recreational roots, to the 1930s, when the solution was to open up more acreage, not cut places off.
Las Vegas essentially has five outdoor recreation areas—Kyle and Lee canyons, Red Rock, Valley of Fire and Lake Mead—that are easily accessible to the public. The areas combine for over 15 million annual visitors.
But, contrary to what some might think, these aren't the only scenic areas in Southern Nevada.
The area has oodles of Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act funds available to create more recreational opportunities in the vicinity. But, aside from the Lakeshore Drive improvements at Lake Mead, what has it done for us lately?
There are so many undeveloped and underdeveloped areas in our surrounding federal lands that could provide recreational opportunities just as nice as those at the already crammed areas. Lovell Canyon, east of Red Rock, is just as scenic and wooded as Kyle Canyon, but is accessible only by one lonely paved road with few picnic or camping options. The east end of Lake Mead, south of Mesquite, has fascinating high country and historical sites, but not one lake access. The Desert National Wildlife Range north of Las Vegas has a group of four-wheel-drive roads that few Nevadans will ever see.
It could be said that making these areas more visitor-friendly would expose them to the same fate as Mount Charleston. Perhaps, but who's to say? With proper planning of picnic areas, campgrounds and trails (with a heavy distribution of trash cans and restrooms), maybe people would take care of their litter instead of tossing it aside.
I'm not saying that we should pave the whole countryside. But consider that 70,000 of the 190,000 acres at Red Rock Canyon are wilderness. Spring Mountains National Recreation Area has over 100,000 acres already set aside exclusively for wilderness preservation instead of recreation. And at Lake Mead National Recreation Area—again, key words "recreation area"—more than a quarter million acres of the 1.5 million acre park are designated wilderness or wilderness study area.
These ares are permanently cut off from development for recreational purposes. But in so doing, wilderness preservation also further strains the overused areas that have been opened up.
The areas around Las Vegas are national treasures—there's no doubt about that. But the ones we can all easily get to are choked, and it's time that the recreation areas we've had in place since those long rides to Ice Station Zebra are joined by a few new options, 20 years and 1.2 million people later.