Explore Las Vegas during Ice Age at new state park, coming this fall

The Ice Age Fossils State Park in North Las Vegas may look unassuming, but by the end of 2023, officials say it won’t be so bare bones.

The preserved traces of mammoths, dire wolves, prehistoric camels and other animals soon will be the focus of Nevada’s newest state park, established in 2017. Limited funding left the park unfinished and closed to the public while the Nevada Division of State Parks sought new sources of funding.

Now, a $3.5 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust will allow the state to complete the project by this fall, trustees and state park officials said during a news conference Wednesday.

Nevada State Parks Administrator Bob Mergell said he hopes the project will be a gateway to the outdoors for both locals and tourists who may not want to travel too far out of town.

“This is a fairly unique thing. You don’t find a lot of facilities that focus on the Ice Age and megafauna,” Mergell said. “There’s a very unique story to be told here that you just can’t find anywhere else — you certainly can’t find the fossils that we have on-site.”

The park’s inception came out of then-Gov. Brian Sandoval’s “Explore Your Nevada” tourism initiative during his last term in office. It directed $13 million in state money and another $1.2 million in federal money to the state park system, the Review-Journal reported. But delays and funding cuts during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by rising construction costs due to inflation, put the roughly $11 million project over budget, Mergell said. The project was put on hold until the Helmsley Trust expressed interest.

When completed, the 315-acre park will have a visitor center with fossils, interactive exhibits, a historical film and a place for temporary displays.

Three different trails will show visitors different parts of the park, including the Big Dig site and the megafauna trail, an ADA-accessible loop path where visitors will see life-size displays of the massive mammals that once grazed that land.

Visitors will also have shaded areas along the trails and at a picnic pavilion.

Also featured at the park will be an 18-foot-tall mammoth sculpture made of scrap metal found at Tule Springs — re-creating a creature that once roamed the land with the material dumped on it.

Sculptor Tahoe Mack came up with the Monumental Mammoth idea for her Girl Scouts Gold Award project and agreed to permanently display it at the park, after it was featured at the Life is Beautiful and Burning Man festivals in 2019.

The Helmsley Charitable Trust has previously donated to Nevada institutions through its rural health care initiative. It’s also supported visitor center projects at other public lands in the country, such as Badlands National Park and Custer State Park in South Dakota. That’s because the trust sees land conservation and health care as intertwined, Trustee Walter Panzirer said.

“The trust believes by getting people out into nature and getting people out into the community — whether it’s exercising on the trails or just taking a mental break and enjoying nature — they’ll have better health outcomes,” Panzirer said.

For Mergell, it’s a chance to see the desert for what it once was — a thriving wetland home to massive creatures. He said he grew up in the area about 30 years ago and would ride horses through the man-made Trench Cave.

“It wasn’t until I went out on-site with an actual paleontologist, who pointed out all the fossil remnants that are out there, that I knew,” he said. “It’s amazing when you can look at something with a totally different perspective.”

McKenna Ross is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Contact her at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on Twitter.