(upbeat music) - [Spokesperson 1] Support for "Wild Nevada Memories" is provided by the William N. Pennington Foundation.

- [Spokesperson 2] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed.

- [Spokesperson 3] Gail and John Sande.

- [Spokesperson 4] Margaret and Charles Burback.

- [Spokesperson 1] And by individual members.

(lively music) - It's been 20 years since "Wild Nevada" first appeared on public television.

Over the years, many people have asked, "What's it like to travel around and make the show?"

So let's celebrate the 20th anniversary by reliving one of our favorite adventures and sharing some "Wild Nevada Memories."

- Welcome to "Wild Nevada," I'm Chris Orr.

- And I'm Dave Santina.

And as you can tell, we are in Las Vegas.

Yeah, we say as you can tell, but you can't tell.

That's why we had to actually show Las Vegas in a different shot, 'cause at the time we couldn't realize how far away the city looked.

- This was the first time we had filmed a "Wild Nevada" in so long.

- This was the very first show we shot after a 12-year break between seasons.

So, everything was new here.

- Dave and I kinda looked at each other and it was like, how do you do this again (laughs)?

- New equipment, new crew, I way over-scheduled it.

So we did way too much and in a very small amount of time.

- Definitely felt some cobwebs (laughs).

- [Dave] Here we rendezvous with Ranger Sky McClain, who will introduce us to our surroundings.

- Morning.

- Good morning.

Welcome to St. Thomas.

So glad you're here.

- Thanks for having us.

Glad to have you.

- Sky McClain, the most patient person in the world.

We made her, we made her prove it.

- Right, we'll be visiting St. Thomas, which is about a mile out on the trail.

And this is a very fertile area even today.

And it's no wonder that Native Americans lived here thousands of years ago.

And in 1865, the settlers of St. Thomas first appeared right here.

(pensive music) - [Dave] St. Thomas was once a town of 500 people supporting agriculture and small businesses.

Then Hoover dam was built in the 1930s, and this area flooded and became part of Lake Mead until drought lowered the lake level.

- One of the fascinations about St. Thomas is that until about 2002 it was submerged under about 70 feet of water.

And if you look below us, you can kind of see where the lake level would kind of continually drop.

And you can see these layering.

And then as the lake level dropped fairly rapidly, they started to see at least one particular structure that started to appear out of the water.

- One of the cool things about this location was even though it was a man-made effect, is you can really see that ebb and flow of water in the desert.

The Park Service went ahead and built this path to better afford visitors a way to get to the town site.

- One of the first features that we're going to come to as you're walking to St. Thomas is these two concrete kind of little walls.

And this is the remnants of a canal system that allowed the Mormon settlers to get water from the Muddy River, which is basically out in the middle of the valley there.

If you look up close, you can see where they had some kind of either wooden or metal structure that they could close off the waters in the ditch, and then they could raise them up.

- We're always trying to find ways to shoot without getting our crew members shadows in the shot.

But sometimes when the sun's at that low of an angle, there's just no way around it so we just live with it.

- Well, and even today, a lot of places still have these kind of irrigation systems.

- That's how my grandpa irrigates.

I remember going to change water out of my grandpa's alfalfa fields with him.

And changing those waterways on those little dikes.

We all need to remember that a place like this won't be here very long unless people respect it.

- As we approach this feature right here, you'll notice this cabling system set up.

The reason that we put this in place is we needed to protect this area.

As people were coming out to St. Thomas, they were walking right through the feature.

And this is why this particular area has this cable, because people were cutting straight across the foundation.

- [Dave] Well, let's go around.

(cheerful music) - Wow, now it really opens up.

- Yeah, we have reached the main road into St. Thomas.

Over the course of about a 65-year period between 1865 and 1925, this community went through a lot of changes.

- She had so much information.

We get a fraction of it in this show.

I wish you could hear it all.

Maybe the best way would be to go visit yourself and have Sky take you out.

- The initial settlers left for about 10 years because of a boundary dispute.

They were told that they had to pay back taxes in gold coin.

They had thought they were in Utah, or maybe Arizona, Nevada said, "Nope, you are in Nevada."

And it took about 10 years for settlers, including Mormon settlers, to return.

- Until the shows are done, I don't always see a lot of the footage.

And it's so cool to not only see the final product, but to see the historic photos.

- I mean, can you imagine having to just imagine this?

It's so much more powerful to see those photos, and see what used to be here.

And you really feel a sense of loss when you are able to see what used to be.

(mellow music) - [Chris] It's so cool that you still have a street as you go along here.

- This is one of the homes.

I think this is the Whitmore home.

That you can see there was a basement at one time.

If you wanna look behind me, this is a cistern.

And we have put some safety grating up on it because these are about 15 to 18-feet deep.

And then they would use a bucket system to bring the water out.

And about once a year, they would send usually the smallest person in the family down to scour out the well.

- Sometimes we'll leave the tripod back in the car and we're shoulder-mounting these shots.

So one of the tricks to do is we just bend our knees, and you keep your knees bent like shocks.

And you get that slow movement.

- That would not be a job I would want, is having to go down.

- No!

I used to complain about taking out the trash.

Can you imagine?

Go clean the cistern, forget it.

- [Sky] So let's head on down the road, and we'll see what we can find in the rest of the town.

(lively music) - So oftentimes you'll see a shot where the camera's at ground-level, and it's just Chris and Dave's feet passing through the frame.

And we do that in order to give ourselves a transition from one part of the segment to the other.

(lively music continues) - This is the iconic school building.

We're standing in the front of the school.

You can see the steps behind us.

And this led up to a two-story schoolhouse.

In addition to just having the regular classes, they had plays here.

I'm sure they had a lot of community meetings here, especially when they realized that the town was going to be flooded by water.

- Yeah, I bet.

It's fun to think about and imagining being a student in this school and coming out these steps, and there's the roadway.

It's fun to try to make this come back to life as a real town.

So, Sky, you have some recorded memories from residents who lived here.

- Yeah, we came across a number of quotes that we've really enjoyed and I'd like to share these with you.

This is from Uzelle Prince Preston.

And she said, "Recess was the highlight of the day.

"We played all of those good games like, pump pump pull away, steal sticks, kick the can, run sheep run, marbles, and baseball.

I think some of those we recognize, others not so much.

- [Chris] And recess is always the best part of the day, in my mind.

- Oh, for sure, for sure.

- Thanks for sharing all this with us, I love it.

- You're welcome, it was great.

- Let's go to the ice cream shop and get a cone.

- [Sky] Okay, we're ready.

- As videographers, we're always trying to get as many different angles and shots as possible.

So you'll often see the camera on the ground or held up high, and then just out the car window.

It's always fun to get as much of a variety as we can.

(cheerful music) - [Dave] Finding Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument isn't difficult, it's over 22,000 acres along the north edge of Las Vegas and up Highway 95.

- Tule Springs was a really interesting location because you're literally in a neighborhood.

And then the next thing you know, you're in a protected historic area.

- It felt funny to do that though.

It's strange to be right on the edge of town and be going into a National Park Service area.

- Hi, guys.

- Hi, how ya doing?

- Thanks for meeting us out here today.

- Yeah, no problem.

- So, what are we looking at?

- Well, we're in Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.

This is an area where there are thousands of fossils embedded in these deposits here.

- When I watch myself sometimes struggle to get out a question or say something, you see a lot of this.

- We can actually see fossils that are still in some of the rock structure?

- Well, let me put it this way.

All of these deposits are fossiliferous.

So they have the potential to have fossils in them, but we're gonna take you to a place where there's a few of them.

You'll be able to recognize what they look like.

The fossils are protected here.

So just regular folk are not allowed to have a souvenir in a National Park unit.

- But we can go take a look.

- But we can go take a look at it.

- Well, let's go do it.

- Yeah.

- Fossil, fossiliferous.

It's hard to say.

That was the first time I'd ever heard that word.

- Kathleen is a geologist and paleontologist with the U.S Geological Survey, and has been exploring Tule Springs for years.

- Kathleen.

- Yeah?

- I've always wondered how come this layer has all those like dark ridges and that's all nice and smooth.

- Well, for one, this has a more silty clay component to it, and this is sandier.

- So here, she's talking about the fossils.

And I remember trying to creep up against that rock face to get shots of the fossils.

And she kept telling me to get off the fossils 'cause I was standing on, you know, very fragile ground.

- So we have member A, B, D, and E, and it ranges from older than 300,000 to about 155,000.

- So what I notice is, horizontally, there's a pretty definitive line.

Was there an event there that caused this total change in the way that it looks.

- Yeah that's an awesome question.

This is actually called a geologic contact.

- That was an awesome question.

That made me feel good.

She was so fun, kind of a mad scientist, really fun to hang out with.

- And do you find fossils throughout the various layers or are they centered in- - We do find them.

So the whole formation is pretty fossiliferous.

So we haven't found any mammoths in this stuff yet here in Tule Springs.

We found little guys, little invertebrates, like ostracods.

But member B, lots of fossils.

So, and people look at it and go, but it's all white dirt.

It looks all the same, but it's not.

I swear it's not.

- Tule Springs has only been a national monument since 2014.

And Jill played a large role in making that happen.

Before that, it was slated for commercial development.

But when Jill attended a public meeting about it, she was moved to act.

- The Bureau of Land Management told our community there were 438 fossil sites designated laying on the surface of mammoths and sloths, and we had camels here.

- Oh my gosh.

- We got together afterwards and thought, why would we not preserve it for our kids?

For the future generations, and for this science education that's so important today.

- Advocacy can really work.

And as someone who's very passionate about our environment and about our open areas, to me, it's very important to know that advocacy sometimes has real power.

(lively music) - So this is kind of a, this is basically a high-graded site.

And there's fossils in this stuff too.

So just the average person walking around here, you're not gonna know, you're just gonna walk.

And you're gonna enjoy.

- Probably why it's still here.

- [Kathleen] You may notice something, but you keep looking and then you finally go, okay, I know what that is.

- Look, she just found one right there.

- Exactly, that's bone.

- We bring the little, tiny kids up here.

And I'd say, okay, now you've seen that, do you see any bone?

And they get so excited when they find something.

- Bone - Yeah, that's right!

- [All] Yay!

- We had to get a shot of my finger pointing at that bone after.

Otherwise, you wouldn't even know what we were pointing at.

- Even without the fossils, Tule Springs has its share of visual appeal.

(relaxing music) - Oftentimes, you'll see a shot where there's an object that's out of focus, and it slowly comes into focus.

And we usually do that on foliage.

And it's called a rack focus in the world of videography.

One of my favorite times to film "Wild Nevada" is in the late afternoon, early evening.

And we get this golden light.

- Its a real double-edged sword because the light is so beautiful in that moment of the late afternoon, yet we know we gotta get out.

And quit shooting (laughs).

- There's also this really cool kind of rock here called tufa.

There was mammoth, horse, antelope, a giant bird called the teratorn was found here.

One of the largest flying birds of the Pleistocene.

Looked just like that.

(Chris and Dave laughing) So there's a couple of pieces of bone eroding out of here.

This is a very well-known locality.

Lots of fossils came out of this place, but there's still bone coming out.

And it's in this horizon that's about 20,000 years old.

- [Chris] And do you think there's more to be found?

- [Kathleen] Oh yeah, oh, so much more.

You walk around and there's fossils coming out of the ground.

- We're lucky we're able to come and see it.

- Yeah.

- It could have been your latest 7/11.

- Yeah.

- Hey, I like a Slurpee as much as anybody.

But not that much.

- I tell people that all the time, that the city of Las Vegas has been built on these types of deposits.

- The sun is setting on Tule Springs, which is our cue to get back to town for the night.

We've got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.

(lively music) - Early the next morning, we start out for Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area.

It isn't hard to see that this is a newly-built roadway, just on the edge of residential construction in Henderson.

In fact, this is the first official building at Sloan Canyon.

A contact station where visitors can get help planning their activities for the day.

We arrived to meet Ranger Jim Flook.

- Morning, Jim.

- Hi, Dave.

- Thanks for meeting us out here.

- Hi there, good morning.

- Good morning.

Welcome to Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area.

Right behind me we have our contact station here.

And this is the spot where you can come and talk to a park ranger, ask any questions you have, get some information to get started on a hike, or anything else you'd like to do here.

- That's cool, and it's fascinating to see this is here with such a great view of downtown.

It feels like we're out in the wilderness, but we're not that far away from town.

- Yeah, we've got one of the best views of Vegas.

- What's cool about getting to show something like Sloan Canyon is show that there is real outdoor areas not too far from downtown Las Vegas.

And you don't have to just stay downtown.

You can get out and enjoy some of that beautiful Southern Nevada desert.

- Oh, wonderful, I know we're gonna do a little bit of hiking today and see some of the sites of the canyon.

- Yeah.

So we're standing at the north entrance to Petroglyph Canyon.

We're actually gonna start out from our south entrance at our Hidden Valley trail head.

And check out a couple of the petroglyphs there.

And after that, we're planning to take a hike on Black Mountain.

- Yeah, scary for me to see Black Mountain.

I'm flashing forward.

- Great.

- My legs are already tired just looking at it.

- Oh, I'm ready to go.

- Let's get started.

- Great climb.

- All right, let's do it.

- All right.

- If you're wondering why we started in a place that we immediately left and drove a long way, it's because that was a brand new building, and that was their visitor center, and they wanted to highlight that.

And we wanted to honor that request.

So that's how it worked out.

- To our Hidden Valley trail head.

This is our 300 trail right here.

This is the south entrance to Petroglyph Canyon.

Only about a five-minute walk or so, about a 10th of a mile.

And you're gonna get to see some Sloan Canyon petroglyphs.

- There are a lot more petroglyphs in the wilderness area, but we were not allowed to take cameras in there.

So this was our compromise.

And it's a great petroglyph wall, but apparently even better stuff is inside, on the trail.

- So a lot of the different peaks that we have aren't necessarily formally named.

And a lot of hiking clubs in the area will develop their own names.

- Okay.

- So sometimes you'll hear them referred to as twin sisters.

Sometimes you hear them referred to as Camelback, or as dromedary as well.

- That makes sense.

(lively music) - Jim's passion for Sloan Canyon is obvious and contagious, and he loves sharing it.

- I think they made him do that.

I think the camera guy said, go stand over there and point.

He did it right.

It looked authentic.

- His only request to all visitors is leave no trace.

- All right, so we've got a few of our petroglyphs over here to the right.

- Every interpretive guide we have will give us a slightly different interpretation of petroglyphs.

You know, there's so much mystery around petroglyphs.

And so, it's kinda cool to be able to layer visits because you do get different perspectives when you go with different guides.

- [Jim] And our question is, well, what does it mean?

The answer is kind of disappointing.

We don't know.

We don't have the ability to interpret any specific glyph.

- [Dave] You can kind of make up your own story if you want.

- You know a lot of times when you see the shots of Chris and Dave from the front, and then it's followed by a shot of them from behind, we do that by hiding one of the videographers behind a bush.

And in that particular shot, I was crouching behind that thorn bush.

And it was not comfortable, and it was poking me, but it worked because you couldn't even see me in the shot.

- But that's just one more reason for you to come on out and see them in person.

We could wander and search for more rock art all day, but Jim has something even bigger in store for us.

So we return to the vehicles and retrace our steps back into Henderson.

- In between the petroglyph segment and this segment, we needed to eat.

So we went and grabbed lunch.

And we were looking at the clock thinking, "Do we have time?"

And Jim said, "Sure, we can make it, we can do it."

What he should've said is I can do it by myself without you guys.

But if you wanna come and bring your cameras, and bring that slow, old guy, good luck.

And that's what we did.

It's odd starting a mountain hike in a neighborhood, but this is the Shadow Canyon trail head.

It's the result of a partnership between the city of Henderson and the BLM.

The trail begins on the Anthem East trail and continues into Sloan Canyon territory.

- [Jim] We're basically the backyard for folks that live here in Henderson.

Makes it real easy for folks to come join us on a regular basis.

- [Dave] Well, should we get our hike started?

- So, this particular trip, I'm using shoelaces as a belt because I forgot my belt.

All the time for some reason.

- Let's take a quick look at our map here before we get started.ú Got a nice smiley face here for our location.

So we are going to be taking the Black Mountain South Loop.

So we're looking at a six and a half-mile walk from here.

It's quite a hike.

It's a fun hike, but definitely not a beginner hike.

- Well, we got our sunscreen on and we got our water.

So I think we're set and ready to do it.

- Yeah.

- Okay, let's head out.

- Right now we all look like that smiley guy.

Let's see how we feel in a few miles.

(lively music) - The Black Mountain trail is one of many in Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area.

Each trail has been given a number, and you'll see them identified by those numbers on trail markers.

It felt great just to stretch my hiking legs and get out there.

I spend a lot of my free time, when I can have some free time, hiking and trail running, and trying to get outside, stay in shape.

Of course, anytime you're going to be out for an extended period, make sure to bring food and plenty of water.

They are essential when you are hiking in locations that are extremely arid, or climbing an elevation.

Today, we are dealing with both.

As we gain in elevation, the views all around us get better and better.

When we hike as a crew, it does take us a little longer, because you hike most of it twice.

'Cause you hike it and then you hike it for the camera.

And sometimes you hike the same segment not just twice, but sometimes three times.

(lively music continues) - Stopping point?

- Yeah.

- What are we looking at here?

- Well, believe it or not, we're looking at the outside edge of about an 18 million-year old strato volcano.

- Oh, cool!

- So all of this rock is igneous rock, which is volcanic.

And one of the dead giveaways is to look at this porous nature of the surface.

You're looking at spots where pockets of gas escaped as they came up.

- Can you imagine a volcano actively happening right here.

- We knew that we were running short on time, and that it was gonna be a more challenging hike.

So we left the tripods in the cars, and opted to go all handheld for this part.

So a lot of times you'll see a camera down at a low angle because what we were doing was resting that camera on a rock to stabilize our shot so it wasn't wobbling around as much.

- So I have to say this to me is the quintessential desert vegetation.

This is what I think of when I think desert.

- Yeah, if you're gonna think about the Mojave desert, you've gotta be thinking about a Joshua tree.

- [Chris] So what makes a Joshua tree so adapted to this area?

- The Joshua tree is not gonna get water all the time, but it's going to store that water and it's gonna grow as it's available.

So, you know, in some ways it's a lot like a college student.

You've got to really think about when that resource is coming in, and how you're going to use it, right?

- [Chris] You have to budget that allowance or budget that money, right?

- Don't blow it on the weekend.

- [Jim] All right, let's get going to the top.

- You're working us hard today.

- [Jim] Oh, it hasn't even started.

- This is getting really difficult.

I remember, this is where I started to really slow down.

Everybody was getting ahead.

At this point, I'm beginning to fatigue and fall behind.

I tried to go too fast to keep up with the avid hikers, Jim and Chris.

And that's a mistake.

At one point, I begin feeling lightheaded and I have to stop and sit down, drink some water and eat something to get some salt in my system.

- We're near the peak of Black Mountain.

I may not make it with the daylight that's left.

But it sure is beautiful, even right here.

This is where I cannot emphasize enough, take food and water with you.

I really don't know what I would have done without it.

(lively music) - [Chris] This kind of climbing is not necessarily fast.

And as we continue, we're getting more concerned about how much light we have left in the day.

- [Dave] That's how far ahead of me everybody got.

Sunlight's dwindling, we're not gonna take a chance.

We're gonna come back down.

Still, pretty spectacular view.

(lively music) - [Chris] When out exploring, we always want to err on the side of safety.

And ultimately, that's what we did here.

- Dave, how are you feeling?

- You can tell I'm feeling a little bit fatigued and thank you for the poles, 'cause I was really starting to feel it down there.

- I, off-camera on a personal hike, have pushed my limits past where I should have, and ended up in not a very good place because of it.

So I had a lot of respect for Dave, you know, raising his hand and saying, "I'd had enough for the day."

And look at it this way, we still have a gorgeous view.

- [Jim] Yeah, we've got this incredible view looking back towards the entirety of the Las Vegas valley.

It's just incredible.

- It is stunning.

- We had to go back down the mountain.

And it was so late in the day that we wound up finishing that hike in the dark with two headlamps split between all of us.

We learned from that point on that we couldn't pack too much in in one day.

(upbeat music) (lively music) - Jim, as a mountain goat, he could've run up that mountain.

Big guy, obviously in great shape, way better than me.

And while we were climbing up the hill, we were chatting and we discovered that he is a line dancer.

He and Chris talked about line dancing, and she used to be a line dancer too.

And so they talked dancing and I just breathed heavily in the back.

(cheerful music) - [Spokesperson 1] Support for "Wild Nevada Memories" is provided by the William N. Pennington Foundation.

- [Spokesperson 2] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed.

- [Spokesperson 3] Gail and John Sande.

- [Spokesperson 4] Margaret and Charles Burback.

- [Spokesperson 1] And by individual members.

(cheerful music continues)