Walking tour to boost tourism downtown

The Boulder City Museum and Historical Association is introducing a new interactive exhibit it hopes will be educational and economically beneficial to the Boulder City Historic District.

The Historic Boulder City Audio Walking Tour, expected to launch this spring, will attract tourists to Boulder City, educate them on the town’s colorful history and bring business to the historic district’s many restaurants and shops, said the museum and hotel’s general manager, Roger Shoaff.

“We want to bring the museum out into the community,” Shoaff said. The tour will give visitors a more thorough history of Boulder City than the museum does, and all of the stops on the tour are in the historic district, he said.

“They’ll be walking right past the city’s antique stores, boutiques and restaurants,” Shoaff said Tuesday.

The Public Works Department recently paved a concrete sidewalk surrounding the mural of bighorn sheep standing over Lake Mead at Sundial Park to meet Americans with Disabilities Act regulations in preparation for the walking tour launch, the city announced in a memo. The mural will be an alternative to the second stop on the tour, which requires visitors to climb stairs to visit an exhibit in the Los Angeles water and power building foyer.

The mural will be one of 10 stops on the tour, which can be accessed three ways: Tourists can download a native smartphone application called “Boulder City Walking App,” scan a QR code at each site using any free QR scanner app or dial a phone number for two to three minutes of audio per site. The Boulder City app will be available once the tour is launched, Shoaff said.

OnCell, a mobile tour app company, has millions of users and is producing the tour, which will begin at the Boulder City Hotel and end in Boulder City Museum, on the hotel’s second floor.

OnCell provided the museum with a map and the museum added the tour stops, which will include the water and power building, the Lake Mead overlook and City Hall, which was a school in 1932, Shoaff said.

Shoaff said while there’s no official date set for the tour’s kickoff, museum staff are working to finalize and order signage for the tour, and are hoping to put the finishing touches on the program in the next couple of months.

Contact Kimber Laux at klaux@bouldercityreview.com or 702-586-9401. Find her on Twitter: @lauxkimber