Spring Mountain Ranch State Park

Fifteen miles west of downtown Las Vegas, tucked against the red Wilson Cliffs at the edge of Red Rock Canyon, there is a wide green lawn — actual grass, shaded by cottonwoods, fed by mountain springs — and the surprise of it in the middle of the Mojave is the whole point. Spring Mountain Ranch is a 528-acre oasis, a working ranch turned luxury hideaway turned state park, and its history is as colorful as any property in southern Nevada.

The springs are why anyone stopped here. They watered the Southern Paiute for thousands of years, then the mountain men and emigrants on the Old Spanish Trail, who came over Mountain Springs Summit and were grateful for the only reliable green for miles. One of those early figures was the trapper Bill Williams, who is said to have grazed stolen horses on the land, leaving it known for a time as the Old Williams Ranch. In 1876 a settler named James Wilson filed a formal claim and established Sandstone Ranch; the blacksmith shop and the little Sandstone Cabin, built in the 1860s, are among the oldest standing buildings in Nevada, and three generations of Wilson men lie in a small family plot on the grounds.

What makes the ranch irresistible, though, is the parade of owners who followed. A Hollywood furrier raised chinchillas here. Then came Chester Lauck — Lum of the wildly popular radio comedy team Lum and Abner — who bought the place in 1948, renamed it the Bar Nothing Ranch, built the handsome sandstone ranch house that now serves as the visitor center, and dammed a reservoir he named Lake Harriet after his wife, complete with a little hydroelectric setup he cheerfully called Boulder Dam, Jr.

In 1955 Lauck sold to Vera Krupp, a German actress married into the Krupp arms-and-steel dynasty, who gave the ranch its current name and ran it with real affection — adding a pool, a bedroom with a secret passage, and a kennel of Great Danes. She is also the source of its most cinematic episode: in 1959, robbers forced their way into the house at dinner and pulled a 33-carat blue-white diamond from her finger. It was recovered six weeks later in New Jersey, and a decade after that Richard Burton bought the stone for Elizabeth Taylor, who wore it for the rest of her life as the Taylor-Burton diamond.

Krupp's buyer, in 1967, was Howard Hughes — the reclusive billionaire then holed up in a Strip hotel, buying southern Nevada by the acre. It is not clear he ever set foot on the ranch; it was run by his lieutenants. When a later owner tried to turn the property into a gated golf-and-equestrian subdivision in the early 1970s, public outcry killed the plan, and Nevada bought the ranch as a state park in 1973.

Today the ranch is a quiet, shaded counterpoint to the red-rock drama next door. You can tour the old buildings and the ranch-house museum, walk the Ash Grove Trail to the only naturally growing ash grove in southern Nevada, spread a picnic on that improbable lawn, or catch an outdoor play under the cliffs at the Super Summer Theatre. After the heat and noise of the city, the green and the quiet feel almost unreasonable.