Europe's demise

[WAB]

The Japanese penis festival, now that is a parade.

Probably the world's most dickish festival.

There's a parade?? I'd be very wary of the guy behind me...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Las Vegas has no redeeming features in terms of habitability of climate. It exists only because people choose to dump huge sums of money there, and with enough money, humans can live almost anywhere.

It was actually a perfectly fine meadowed valley before a European style city was plopped on top of it, as its name correctly suggests. Lovely country, still, if you turn around and look at the hills instead of the mess. They just overbuilt.

Meadow??

Admittedly, some features get labeled "meadow" that do not remotely conform to what typically comes to mind for the word. I'm thinking of the "meadow" on North Loop--quite notably smooth and flat terrain compared to what's around it. (The trail ascent is in the ballpark of 1,000'/mile, by the crow the climb is even steeper.) It's exposed position means there are no trees on most of it. Thus it is a "meadow". But it's a flat expanse of rocks, basically devoid of any vegetation for most of the year. Rocky enough that inexperienced people won't see the trail at all, sometimes not even with guidance. (The passage of countless boots over the decades has pressed the pebbles a little flatter.)

 

[Politesse]

Perhaps meadowed is not the right word. The springs from which the city derived its name were surrounded by long swards of grassy wetland, usually called "fens" by ecologists. Not exactly the equivalent of a Swiss Alpine meadow, but not dry desert pavement either. If you want to see a similar environment today, they can be found around cienegas in other parts of the Great Basin. You can still visit the city's original springs as well, there's a little state preserve to mark what's left of them, but as the signage rightly notes, the draining of the aquifer below and agricultural activity in the surrounding area have greatly changed the landscape from how it appeared when the Spanish first settled around them. If you're in LV and don't want to drive too far, Red Rock SP preserves a nice little natural cienega called Red Spring with a boardwalk and picnic tables and whatnot, all very civilized, and it has more of the right kind of vegetation and ground cover to represent the original environment: