Off the Plateau: Nevada without Vegas!

Coming off the Plateau
We ended our exploration of the Colorado Plateau here, returning to the city where we stepped off a plane and—unlike most visitors—immediately left town. The contrast between the natural spaces of the southwest and the over-the-top, artificial environment of Vegas couldn’t have seemed greater as we returned from 10 days in canyons, valleys, and chasms.

This was my third visit—solely a result of the cheap airfares we booked to start our trip—and consisted of a stop at Valley of Fire State Park, a night in town to rendezvous for dinner with a long-time friend, and a pre-dawn departure. We spent an evening at Paris Las Vegas, which despite my reservations about Vegas, I confess to enjoying. We strolled around this interior recreation of the real Paris’ exterior streets, nicely concluded by a delicious sidewalk dinner at Mon Ami Gabi.

If you’re looking for a more authentic encounter—perhaps with the natural world—consider Valley of Fire State Park, an hour northeast via I-15. More drive time will take you to more spectacular sites on the Plateau, but the redrock and petroglyphs here are a good introduction to what lies beyond.

Vegas for a Gamblophobe
Who comes to Vegas and leaves with their wallet intact? Well, that’s always been my plan. If you believe that every sin is a misguided virtue, than echoing C.S. Lewis, I’m sorely lacking whatever quality is distorted into gambling. Show me a blackjack or roulette table, a slot machine, a craps game, and all I see are the myriad ways your money will disappear, and how likely (and quickly) that will happen. My sole—and infrequent—enjoyment in this area is playing a low stakes game, setting my winnings aside as they accrue, and taking home a little bit of the house’s money when the stake is gone. Put up , came out with .50? Take that, Mr. House!

So Harrah’s isn’t jumping for joy when I hit town, and the feeling is mutual. I can’t escape the feeling that the desert is a very odd place for an urban megalopolis: where summer temperatures routinely top 100 degrees, and the need to encompass 1.5 million bodies (plus visitors) with air conditioning consumes every megawatt of power generated by Hoover Dam. The defiance of the natural environment here is staggering.

Quick Tips:

Even if you’re not a gambler, the architecture of these gaming palaces—particularly the newer ones—is amazing. What they lack in originality they make up for in scale and execution: Bellagio, Paris Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay, The Venetian; strolling through their lobbies is an experience (just as they meant it to be). I find my reactions swinging between admiration, irritation, and amazement that the tremendous expense can be recouped (Paris Las Vegas cost nearly billion to build in the late 1990’s; the new Wynn Las Vegas was .7 billion—the most expensive hotel ever built).

The days of luring gamblers with cheap food and cheap hotels are gone. Vegas is well into its transition into luxury destination. If you're looking for a convenient, off-strip, non-gambling hotel, consider the Holiday Inn Express just west of McCarran Airport. We had a clean, spacious, well-appointed room for under .

I spent seven years in Philadelphia, watching (from a distance) the gambling industry transform Atlantic City—or at least the boardwalk. Moving two blocks away from the ocean was enough to show you that Trump et al. hadn’t raised all boats equally, and hadn’t moved some at all. Since then, it’s always been instructive to supplement time at any main attraction with time in the rest of the city it’s housed in. A long search for a Vegas basketball court several years ago indicated that Vegas is faring better than the decrepit neighborhoods of Atlantic City, but there’s still a lot of typical urban America here that would seriously interfere with the suspension of disbelief they hope to create on the Strip.

Drive out to the edge of town to see just what kind of natural environment this city arose in. I-15 North will get you there; or head south towards Hoover Dam (whose power and stored water make this city possible). This is truly desert country—you’re several hundred miles from the closest naturally occurring, substantial patch of green. Hoover Dam is another good place to contemplate the wisdom of living in such stark opposition to what the environment gives: a temple to re-engineering the natural world, I was simultaneously awed by its scale and scope, and angered by the celebratory mosaics that hold up nature as a hostile force to be tamed for the benefit of mankind. The battle over damming the Colorado began here before the stakes were raised at Glen Canyon.

Best Way To Get Around:

Any time spent on the strip will show you that the sheer volume of humanity makes all forms of getting around problematic. Sidewalks, streets—they’re all jam-packed. My impression is that walking is just about as fast as ‘driving’ on a busy night, of which there are more and more as Vegas tries to eliminate any ‘off-season’.

I wouldn’t count on much mass transit here: practical, cheap, and unflashy are antithetical to the Spirit of Vegas. They could use it, though: there’s a lot of people who work hard for low pay in all the service jobs in the hotel/casino industry, and live in the parts of town you never see. I guess it’s logical that the city’s first attempt near the Strip would be a monorail, which runs east of the strip from the MGM Grand north to the Sahara and costs—gulp— for this 3-mile ride.

When we headed north in early evening, from our hotel near the airport to Paris Las Vegas, we spent more time sitting in traffic than moving. Surprisingly enough, returning at 10 pm was a lot easier. There’s always free parking at the casinos, whether you’re headed inside or not (just don’t get in the valet parking line).

Our ‘Grand Circle’ of the Colorado Plateau started and ended in Las Vegas. If you’re interested, the seven-part series chronicling our trip includes:

• Zion National Park
  
• Northern Arizona: Kaibab to Kayenta
  
• The Grand Canyon’s North Rim
  
• Monument Valley and Southeast Utah
  
• Capitol Reef NP
  
• Crossing Utah's Backroads and Backlands
  
• Bryce Canyon NP
  

This was a perfect place for a family to stay in Vegas. Our game plan was to arrive just in time to meet friends for dinner, spend the night close to McCarran Airport, and head off for our 6:45 flight the next morning. Located just west of McCarran, and right off I-15, it was a perfect match.



We pulled in about 5:30, hot, tired, and reeling a little. The contrast between the glorious, open, natural spaces of the southwest, often experienced sans other human accompaniment, and the… well… unusual, artificial, and extremely urban environment of Las Vegas couldn’t have been more striking. Spending 40 minutes parked in a traffic jam on I-15 was a severe and abrupt return to reality.

Vegas made my kids nervous, and staying off the strip was just fine. It’s perfectly possible to visit Vegas without a car, but I don’t think you’d want to stay here if you did: it’s not that far from the strip—3/4 of mile from the Mandalay Bay, at the strip's south end—but this isn’t walking territory. The hotel sits in the middle of a large plot of land that’s clearly just being developed, and nearly all of the distance to the strip is on freeway overpasses or near entrance/exit ramps (the hotel runs a complimentary shuttle to the Mandalay Bay to spare you this experience).

We didn’t experience too much of the hotel; we simply didn’t spend enough time there. The pool looked inviting, the breakfast room was ample and clean (and unfortunately empty of food as we headed out the door at 4:30 am). It’s a larger property—for Holiday Inn Express, not for Vegas!—with four floors and 170 rooms. My experience in the newer HI Express rooms has been very positive: they’re larger than average and nicely furnished, with small fridges, microwaves as well as the usual coffee and iron. This one was no exception. We booked a two queen-bed room with a pullout sofa for $98 through www.hiexpress.com, and it was definitely a bargain (the pleasant clerk tried not to laugh when my wife asked the standard "Is that the best rate available?")

I had only two issues: one, for a large place, the passageway to elevators (on the first and every floor) is very narrow and tight, especially so with luggage. And as close as they are to the airport, it’s surprising that they don’t have an airport shuttle. In the end, that didn’t handicap us, since we headed out soon after our—yawn—4 am wake-up call, and the rental car return shuttle got me back to the airport almost before the rest of the family had checked their bags.

If a non-gambling, off-strip, newer hotel with friendly staff, pleasant rooms, pool, and breakfast is what you’re looking for in Vegas: stay here.

Directions:
Exit I-15 at Russell Road and head west. The hotel is on the south side, set back from the road by an open property and the parking lot. Turn left at the light

Some places are immune to pull. While trying to score a table for seven on the outdoor sidewalk patio, my friend at Harrah’s (owner of Paris, where the Las Vegas version of Mon Ami Gabi is housed) discovered that their independent ownership meant that they handed out no favors. No reservations on the patio, period. Oh well; she said, it fits with the Parisian experience they try to create, which fits all the way down to the snooty wait staff. With no cuts in line, we were told to prepare for a 90-minute wait; in the end, it was only 45. Not too bad.

The restaurant is in the very front of Paris, with a fair-sized, slightly elevated patio along the sidewalk. By the time we were seated near 8 pm, the 115° heat of the day had cooled enough for outside seating to be comfortable (desert aridity has its advantages). Located across the street from Bellagio, that hotel’s famous fountains erupted every 15 minutes after 8 pm, giving those of us on the patio or inside the front windows a terrific addition to a great meal.

The wait staff were efficient and courteous; not chatty, but not snooty. Just as well—I still have emotional scars from encounters with true Parisian waiters. Dinner began with baguettes, each delivered in a paper sleeve. A fan of great bread, I could have eaten just the baguettes (well, after slathering them with butter). I ordered roast chicken with lemon and pommes frites, which was delicious: succulent, juicy, and very flavorful. By the time the entrees were finished, we weren’t done catching up with each other’s lives. So my friend led my daughters into quickly ordering four desserts to pass around, including a very traditional and delicious chocolate mousse.

Despite my desire not to be impressed, I ended up really enjoying this restaurant. The food was terrific and the setting was great. Given the location, I thought the prices weren’t too bad—the roast chicken entrees were $18-$19; most beef items were in the low $20’s. If faux Parisien appeals to you while in Vegas, you’ll have a nice evening. If you’re counting on sitting outside or near the windows, you may have a wait. But this place is deceptively large, so getting seated elsewhere shouldn’t take too long.

Advice
They take reservations for indoor seating, but not for the patio. If that’s what you’d like (and it’s a great spot), be sure to leave your name with the host, whose station is just outside the entrance, inside Paris Las Vegas.

There’s two kinds of metaphorical ‘fire’ in this Valley—geological and meteorological. Although it could be either, I’m betting the name stems from the park’s red, red rock. But as my local friend said, after 10 days in this region, you’ve seen plenty of places at least as impressive than this landscape. Although the red sandstone is a match for either the Vermillion Cliffs or Monument Valley, for the most part, its structure wasn’t as interesting to me, appearing more beaten down, worn, and irregular than many others we’d seen.



We didn’t come for the rocks, though; rather, for what was on them. Thanks to two recommendations, we’d added Valley of Fire to our last full day’s itinerary on the Plateau, to see the petroglyphs on the trail to Mouse’s Tank. After a lengthier-than-necessary approach from I-15, we came in the east entrance. I got out to determine how to handle the honor-system admission. About six other cars were there.



The heat was intense. It was 3pm on a mid-June afternoon, and it felt like a furnace. Dry heat, nothin’. We slipped $6 into the box, and headed to the Visitor Center. Thankfully, the AC in this dated building was very effective. Inside, a goodly number of older (1980’s?) exhibits described wildlife, the area’s history and native peoples, and the park’s checkered past. Valley of Fire was Nevada’s first state park—but only because eager boosters pushed up a 1935 dedication ceremony scheduled to open the state’s first four parks the next day. 10 years later, it was dissembled and sold piecemeal during a state budget crisis (the buyers tried to turn around and trade with the state for Las Vegas real estate).



A few years later, Nevada came to its senses, reestablishing the park and extending its boundaries several times. Several interesting features are preserved here: Elephant Rock, the Seven Sisters, and the Beehives (red rock formations that look just like their names); all right off NV 169. You’ll find petroglyphs at Atlatl Rock and Mouse’s Tank.

This place is best as a warm-up when heading east, and not a finale on your way out. We hustled by it on our first day, anxious to reach Zion. That wasn’t a mistake, and neither was visiting 10 days later (the mistake was not coming in the morning). If you have time, it’s worth stopping, but not worth putting at the center of your plans. However, if, like my daughter, you love petroglyphs—or want a good day trip from Vegas—just come.

Directions:
The park lies between I-15 and Lake Mead, an hour NW of Vegas. Take Exit 75 off I-15; it heads southeast into the park. Unless you want a longer, less direct, less scenic route, don’t head south from Exit 93, even if approaching from the north. We did that: it just slowed us down (and made us worry that we were completely lost after Overton).

At Capitol Reef, our oldest daughter was completely captivated by petroglyphs. As she looked for books about her new-found interest at Cedar Breaks, the friendly bookstore volunteer offered a suggestion: "Stop at Mouse’s Tank at Valley of Fire," she told us. "They’re all over the rocks on both sides of the trail." My Vegas friend confirmed it, describing the site as a rock-face sketchbook with all sorts of different ideas explored, practiced, and developed.

With that dual recommendation, we added Valley of Fire to our itinerary. A few dozen cars were there when we arrived, all baking in the Nevada sun. We lathered up with sunscreen, grabbed multiple water bottles, and hit the trail.



In the end, the heat proved too much for us to reach the Tank itself, a natural collecting basin in the rock where water can reliably be found despite the dry, hot surroundings. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s just a good story, but ‘Mouse’ was allegedly a renegade Paiute who hid out in this area at the turn of the last century, sustained by the water he found here. Those folks who’d made it to the Tank and were headed back looked more than a little worn out, despite the trailhead declaration that it was only a half-mile round trip. Luckily for us, our destination was all along the route, and not at trail’s end.



We were thoroughly heated when we returned to our car. It was a little melancholy climbing back in—we were leaving the southwest we came to see (and trading it for Vegas) as we drove through the remaining red rock and left Valley of Fire. As we desperately waited for the A/C to kick in, we headed for I-15, Vegas, showers, and the trip home.

Directions:
From NV 169—the park's main road—turn north 3 miles west of the Visitor Center, then right, after another 1.5 miles.

Ah, Paris… I’m not much of a Vegas fan, but I do like this place. When my in-town friend proposed that our families meet here for dinner, I thought it couldn’t have worked out better. I’ve always been puzzled by Vegas’ decision to imitate every other place in the world, but I’m partial to this attempt to bring the Left Bank to the west shore of Lake Mead. The cobblestones, the famous blue French skies (well, painted ceiling here, I know…) the bread, the wine—maybe I like it because it just feels less like Las Vegas than most of Las Vegas. Wandering through the faux streets and past the mini Arc de Triomphe is free, but ascending the half-scale Nevada version of Le Tour Eiffel is, of course, a ticketed attraction—but of course, so is the full-scale original.

I have yet to forgive my brother for making me bypass the Buffet here on my next-to-last visit. This wasn’t helped when my friend, who works for Harrah’s, confirmed its status as one of the best in the city. She did distract us with plenty of interesting tidbits about the casino’s construction, pointing out how the necessities of HVAC and other structural items were nearly seamlessly disguised as lampposts, bridge supports, etc. (It IS fun to tour with an insider). Be sure to wander by the hotel’s reception area (directly across from the main entrance—on the other side of the casino, of course), with its long row of magnificent chandeliers and a floor that truly sparkles.

Of course, one big difference between the real thing and its Vegas incarnation is the huge money-sucking machine in the middle. I guess that’s not all that different from some aspects of Paris. But around its edge, the chocolatiers, the patisseries, and every other shop ending in –erie give me a reason to feel better about being in Vegas.

We skipped the buffet, though, and ended up landing a sidewalk table for seven out front at Mon Ami Gabi, directly across from the Bellagio fountains. Even though my back was to them, I could watch the impressive display reflected in the authentic-looking plate glass windows, below the traditional French lettering. Even in the desert heat, I thought that was also a pretty good approximation of a Parisian experience, at least on the surface. All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening here.