Not long after dawn on my second day in Boulder City, Nev., I was on a rented bicycle heading for Hemenway Park, where I was told I might spy bighorn sheep grazing near the playground. I didn’t find the sheep, but I did run headlong into herds of much bigger game that Boulder City is hoping to catch.

My route sent me to an exit for a bypass that lets those heading for Hoover Dam, six miles away, avoid Boulder City’s business district, and as I waited at a light I watched no fewer than five packed buses from Las Vegas drive by.

At the dam, they would snap photos and buy souvenirs and, perhaps, journey to the west rim of the Grand Canyon two hours farther. But then they’d almost certainly go straight back to the Strip, never knowing how close they had come to a place so unlike anything else in southern Nevada.

Had those travelers gone straight instead of turning left onto the bypass, they would have encountered what, having just left a city famous for reproductions of the Eiffel Tower and the Manhattan skyline, could easily appear as yet another theme park — in this case, Main Street U.S.A.

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