Judging by the nature of Little Ale'inn patrons, I gathered not. I pointed out to them that Leif wasn't the first to come blaring into Rachel from the heavens.

There is a stretch of land near Rachel which is known to be a layer of sea sediment. What's strange about the sediment is that fossils of deepwater fish and shallow-water mollusks were found to be mixed together. That would be strange, since shallow and deepwater animals wouldn't ordinarily mix. Scientists believe this to be the result of another visitor to Rachel. This one however, came from space, blaring from the heavens 375 million years ago. It hit the sea which filled the Great Basin at the time, throwing the fish, the fossils and everything deepwater onto the shoreline.

Today, dried by the Rockies' barrier, Southern Nevada forms a southern border for the Great Basin - a hydrological and biospheric term for a giant swath of land that has no outlet for water. What was once a set of seas and inland lakes, became a desert - a vast desert of bold mountains.

In other parts of North America, - the growth of woods, the erosion, the intricate valleys - make for confusing geology. But Southern Nevada is young mountains, all facing north-south. On a map, the mountains look like stalled semi's on a northbound freeway. Almost no erosion; they just stick out from a flat sea of scrub.