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Proud of its history, the Nevada town of Mesquite invites visitors to get acquainted with the border town’s past, starting with a visit to its diminutive museum at 35 Mesquite Blvd. Housed in a flat-roofed rock building erected to serve as a library during 1939-41, the Virgin Valley Heritage Museum contains remnants of its past dating back to original settlement by Mormon colonists in the early 1880s. The single-storied museum, later turned into a hospital, was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Unique among local recreation sites, the Old Spanish Trail Park focuses upon the early history of the Las Vegas Valley when it was a major stop along the historic overland route connecting settlements in Spanish New Mexico and California. The 2,700-mile Old Spanish Trail received deserved recognition with its 2002 listing as a National Historic Trail.

While striving to meet the growing demand for wine in this country, the wine industry expands into unlikely areas for viticulture, places once considered too extreme for grapes to flourish. Located in the Mojave Desert just a mountain range away from Death Valley, the driest place in North America, Pahrump Valley ranks among the most unlikely locations for a winery. But there sits the Pahrump Valley Winery, a winebibber’s oasis just an hour’s drive from Las Vegas on Highway 160.

Hidden away in remote locations across the Silver State stand beehive-shaped monuments to Nevada’s mining past. These conical stone or brick structures were ovens that reduced firewood to charcoal used in smelters to remove precious metals from ore. At the height of their use in the late 1800s, the charcoal ovens contributed to the denuding of forests on mountain ranges in Central and Eastern Nevada.