Three dollars gets you into a state park built on top of real Ice Age fossil beds - mammoths, camels, the works - out on the northern edge of Las Vegas.
I went in expecting very little. I knew nothing about the place, assumed the fossils would be a few cases in the visitor centre, and did not have much hope beyond that. It turned out to be one of the happiest surprises of the year.
You will also spend more time there than you think. We did not take a single tour and only paid the entry, and it still ate the morning. We liked it enough to go back.
Per person, not per car, and 12 and under go free. An America the Beautiful pass does not work here - it is a state park, not a federal one.
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 8am to 4:30pm. It is shut on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Getting there
It is further out of town than you expect. It is a lot of highway, then a run of surface streets, and then suddenly a parking lot. You will not miss it, though - there is a life-size mammoth by the road.
It was very quiet when we went, because it was very hot. That is the trade in summer: you get the place nearly to yourself, and you pay for it in sweat.
Start in the visitor centre
It has to be your first stop anyway. Everyone checks in at the visitor centre before heading out on the trails, and that is where you pay the $3.
It is a great visitor centre, too, with real fossils from the beds out the back. Give it a proper look before you go outside - it makes everything you walk past afterwards make sense.
While you are at the desk, ask what is coming up. The park runs ranger-led walks, sunrise hikes, after-dark night hikes along the wash in summer, and kids' programmes at weekends. Most cost nothing beyond the entry fee, but the popular ones need you to register and they fill up - the August night hike was full well ahead.
The short walk is the surprise
The best part was the thing I expected least from: the short Megafauna Trail that loops out from the back of the visitor centre. It is curated and close together, and it is full of life-size metal sculptures of the animals that used to live here. There are wolves, big cats, a whole herd of something deer-shaped I could not name, what I think were goats, and an elephant, or near enough. Far more of them than I expected.
There is a metal bison, and yes, I petted it. It turned out to be the closest I would get - a month later we spent a whole day on Antelope Island hunting for real ones and never got near.
Walk down into the trench
There are three trails, and I walked all of them across the two visits. The one to do is the Big Dig Trail, which takes you down into the trenches bulldozed out in 1962 and 1963, when an expedition came to dig for fossils here. We combined it with the loop through the wash, and the whole stretch reminded us of Twenty Mule Team Canyon in Death Valley, where they shot some of Star Wars.
Down in the trench you can see the patches where they dug further in for different kinds of samples. It honestly feels like walking through an active dig, even though nobody has worked it in decades. There is not much left in the walls, just the remnants of what they found, but the scale of what they moved is the point.
The heat is real
There is no shade out there. There are a few shade structures along the trails, but they are few and far between, and in June it was hot even first thing. Bring more water than you think, wear sunscreen, and be sensible about it. I still think it is worth the heat.
Find JT
On our way out to the Big Dig Trail we got talking to a ranger called JT, and that conversation made the stop. We got the full download on the park and the land around it, from someone who clearly loves the place. A genuine wealth of information and an absolute delight to talk to. If you go, ask for JT.
It was also JT who told us people have turned up annoyed after seeing the park posted online with no mention of a fee. So, to be upfront: it is not free. It is three dollars each.
Who it is for
People who like history, geology and being outdoors. It is a lot of walking and looking rather than touching, so I am not sure it is one for small kids.
If you are visiting Las Vegas, go if you have a spare morning or you really like fossils. If you live there, save it for the cooler months as a way to get out of the house and walk somewhere with something to look at.
Better than the Strip
Nothing about this is expensive, and that is the point. For three dollars it is a better morning than most of what the Strip will sell you, and I would go back.
Get there when it opens, bring water, start inside, then walk down into the trench.