Aerial Antics: Wet'n'Wild Las Vegas

I was snooping around some aerials when writing the article on Speed at the Sahara and noticed that if you work it just right you can get aerials of an open Wet'n'Wild Las Vegas, and ones of the property closed and abandoned.

Here's the park when it was open, the last year for it was the 2004 season. It opened in 1985 hoping to cash in on families in sin city looking for something to do, and quickly became a popular entertainment for locals attracting over a half million visitors annually at its peak. When it closed in '04 it had just completed it's 20th season of operations.

And here's the sad version of the above photo of the park after it closed. The slides are all gone, although I don't know where any of them were moved to. The pools and lazy river were not removed, but they're empty and quickly being overgrown.

There were plans for a giant Ferris Wheel to be built on the location with a casino hotel underneath, but those fell through. Then the western hemisphere's tallest building was going to be built there, but that never happened either. So for now, the park's former location still sits idle.