COMMENTARY: Don’t shed tears over Bonnie Springs closure

This will not be a popular opinion, but I fail to see the tragedy in the loss of Bonnie Springs Old Nevada (Monday Review-Journal). If Bonnie Springs — or the entire State Route 159 loop — is your idea of rural bliss, I suggest you need to get out more.

I have been taking children out to Bonnie Springs for more than 40 years and indeed, through the eyes of a child, it was a wondrous place. In reality, the “Western town” was a tourist trap that had more to do with movie images of life in the Old West than anything that actually happened.

Only once did I take a child into the “movie set,” and the most entertaining thing we saw was when a stunt man had to be cut down while attempting the mock hanging. I wondered then, and still do, at the idea that “High Noon” shootouts and mock hangings were appropriate entertainment for children. But, then, I am an old fuddy-duddy.

The petting zoo was a disgrace that should have been shut down years ago. I’m not an animal rights activist, but it really didn’t take one to see the suffering there.

I used to enjoy taking out-of-towners to the restaurant. It was quaint and rustic, and the children loved feeding the ducks and seeing the turtles in the pond. But there are lots of other opportunities for that. I stopped going to the restaurant years ago when they tried to charge an entry fee per person before we could go to the restaurant. The food was already overpriced, so adding $5 per person for the privilege of dining just wasn’t worth it. Maybe that policy changed in the intervening years, but I wouldn’t know. I never went back and haven’t missed it.

When I first took children out to Bonnie Springs, the population of Las Vegas was around 300,000. You had to drive a good 45 minutes past the last vestiges of development to get there. We saw wild horses on the side of the road at the Calico Basin turn off. There was no traffic, nor were there dozens of cars parked along the side of the road at each trailhead or a miles-long line of cars waiting to get in to the state park. It was a nice little break from city life, but no more.

We have added almost 2 million people to the population of the valley since then, and the pressure has ruined the entire area. If you really want to preserve the peace and tranquility of Red Rock, you have to cut off development and cut off all traffic on SR159. You would have to force people to either bus, walk or bicycle in. I don’t see that happening so, in my opinion, we might as well write off the entire area as a loss to unmanaged growth. Bonnie Springs is far from the biggest tragedy of that loss.

Kathy Espin writes from Las Vegas.