There was a time when defiant Las Vegas residents and developers seemed determined to carpet over the entire desert with lush, green grass.
In 1999, the Southern Nevada Water Authority set out to change that attitude with a new program that paid people to rip out their lawns.
Since then, valley homes and businesses have removed enough turf to cover more than 2,600 regulation football fields and saved enough water to fill more than 63,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
And that's just one way of visualizing the latest milestone for the authority's Water Smart Landscapes program, a conservation effort unique among Southwestern cities that recently surpassed 150 million square feet of grass converted to desert landscaping.
Authority Conservation Manager Doug Bennett likes to imagine it as a strip of sod 18 inches wide and long enough to wrap three quarters of the way around the globe.
"Another 50 million square feet and we'll circle the Earth," Bennett said.
The cash-for-grass program pays up to $1.50 per square foot to qualifying businesses and residents who convert lawns to water-efficient landscapes.
With numerous conversion projects going on at once, it's hard to know for sure exactly when and where the milestone was reached. Bennett said the golf course at Spanish Trail Country Club is a pretty safe bet.
When told that the 150 million-square-foot mark might have been reached at his golf course, Spanish Trail General Manager Freddie Rohani chuckled and said, "Does that mean that for the next year we don't get a water bill?"
The private, 27-hole course in one of the valley's wealthiest neighborhoods has taken out more than 1 million square feet of turf through a series of large landscape conversions over the past five years.
Rohani said that when the course was built 25 years ago, "it was lush green and water wasn't a problem."
"Nobody would have dreamed of turf conversion," he said. "Time goes by, and we have to change accordingly."
Before the landscaping changes, the country club paid more than $1 million a year for water, including summer bills that regularly topped $160,000 a month.
Last year, the course's water bills totaled about $925,000, a savings of roughly 10 percent, Rohani said.