Ice Age Fossils State Park
Fall 2024
Nevada’s newest state park perfectly preserves the state’s ecological history.
BY RYAN SLATTERY
Depending how you frame it, the creation of Ice Age Fossils State Park was either decades or millennia in the making. One could say the park began in 2017, when former governor Brian Sandoval designated it a state park, or in 1958, when the land was acquired by the Nevada State Parks. Perhaps the park really began tens of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene Ice Age, when ancient animals roamed the lush Tule Springs area of southern Nevada.
Today, the 315-acre park preserves thousands of fossilized remains, including Columbian mammoths, bison, saber-toothed cats, American lions, dire wolves, and giant sloths.
But unlike Nevada’s other state parks, Ice Age Fossils was entirely undeveloped upon dedication and was without exhibits, pathways, or even a visitor center. At that time, park managers still had to decide how they were going to protect the sensitive fossils and excavation sites while allowing the public to explore the area. After years of development, Ice Age Fossils State Park made its public debut on January 20.
“In a lot of ways, it was a blank slate,” says park supervisor Garrett Fehner. “We had to envision the entire park from scratch and decide what our important stories were and how to tell them. That’s what we’ve been doing the past six years, determining what the park’s going to look like. It was a pretty intense planning process.”
A Historic Find
For Fehner, the park’s history begins in 1903 after the first fossils were uncovered by Josiah Spurr of the U.S. Geological Survey. This discovery led to more excavations and a claim that had the potential to turn prehistory on its head.
In 1933, blackened material believed to be charcoal and burned bones were found in pockets resembling campfire pits. Upon review, archeologist Mark Raymond Harrington claimed the discovery could prove that humans migrated to the Americas and coexisted with the Pleistocene megafauna much earlier than previously thought, potentially making Tule Springs the oldest archeological site in North America.
Harrington’s theory sparked intense debate and attracted interest across the scientific community. In 1962, biologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists gathered at the site for a four-month excavation known as the Big Dig. To help them study the sediment, heavy construction equipment and earth movers carved 2 miles of deep trenches into the harsh desert landscape.
“The Big Dig was a big deal,” Fehner explains. “ ‘National Geographic’ had a photographer out here because they thought this was going to be something really important. And those claims just did not hold up to that level of scrutiny. They unearthed thousands of fossils, but that’s not really what they were looking for. They wanted to connect these fossils to the humans of that age.”
The “charcoal” that they found was actually carbonized wood and not evidence of a human-made campfire. Nobel Prize winner William Libby, developer of radiocarbon dating, concluded that the recovered material was not from humans, disproving theories that ancient people interacted with Ice Age-era animals.
For Dr. Stephen Rowland, a paleontologist for the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, the expedition was still historic in its findings given that radiocarbon dating was relatively new.
“It was revolutionary because they were actually getting radiocarbon dating while the Big Dig site was being excavated with bulldozers,” Rowland says. “From a paleontologist’s point of view, that’s wonderful history. They found some interesting dates and so on, but they didn’t find any spear points stuck into the rib cages of mammoths or anything to prove there was human interaction with these Ice Age animals at Tule Springs.
As a result, the site sort of fell off the radar screen.”
Exploring The Park
Upon arriving at Ice Age Fossils State Park, the first thing visitors spot is the “Monumental Mammoth,” a tribute to the area’s former residents. The steel skin of this colossal sculpture was created from metal collected during public cleanups of the adjacent Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.
The park has three trails that allow visitors to fully explore the landscape. The flat, 0.3-mile Megafauna Trail features interpretive signs and metal sculptures of the prehistoric animals that once roamed the area. The 1.5-mile Las Vegas Wash Trail weaves through a dry wash area, and the 1.2-mile Big Dig Trail works its way through the deep trenches dug during the Big Dig excavation.
The visitors center offers a glimpse into the past. A video projection shows what the lush landscape would have looked like when ancient animals roamed the land, and a 10-minute film gives a brief introduction to the park. Throughout the center, interactive displays and dozens of excavated finds help fill in the park’s natural history.
Although now an official state park, Ice Age’s story is nowhere near complete. Thousands of fossils have been unearthed, but more are being found to this day. In late March, visitors hiking in the park spotted something on a trail and alerted rangers who went out to the area and excavated a partial Columbian mammoth tooth.
“After it rains new discoveries are often made,” Fehner says. “We don’t point out the fossils to the public but they’re everywhere if you know what you’re looking for. The goal was always to develop this park in a way that sparks interest and curiosity.”