Nevada State Museum - Carson City

Always on the lookout for something fun, we were super excited to go check out the Nevada State Museum! We'd been meaning to go for a while, but what got us over there was when we found out they run the coin press one day a month. Our kids have been very interested in money (and how it's made) lately, so this was a perfect fit for our little family. Plus there's a real mammoth skeleton there, so what's not to love? 

We like to park in the large free parking lot on the corner of Carson and Robinson Streets. It's a short walk across the street to the entrance of the museum. If you're not up for the walk there are a few parking spaces off of Curry, directly in front of the museum entrance.

Admission to the museum is a very doable price, especially if you're bringing a passel of kids. Adults are $8 and children under 17 are free. There really aren't too many places you can take a family for that cheap. 

 The first thing we did was to follow our map of the museum around to the coin press room. We were there in the late afternoon and didn't want to miss our chance to see the press in action. The late afternoon sunlight made it hard to get pictures, sorry! It was really interesting to see the machine work and to learn about the history and the process. Unfortunately, the kids weren't as interested as I was so we moved on after a few minutes.

 The underground mine was definitely our family's favorite part of our museum visit. The kids loved exploring the tunnels and checking out every nook and cranny.

 The next area on our list of favorites was the taxidermy animals. There was such a great variety and they were all so fascinating to look at!
One thing we disliked about this museum (purely from a family with small kids standpoint) was that there wasn't much hands-on stuff for the kids to do there were a few things here or there, like the big horn sheep's horn where the kids could touch it in the photo below, but for the most place this was an eyes-only (not hands-on) kind of place. Really it's exactly what one expects from this kind of museum, but it's always nice to be surprised with family-friendly features like we found at the Railroad Museum.

 This museum really has a lot of interesting things to offer, from prehistoric fossils, to Native American history, to the Wild West, to classic Americana, and more. We only had 2 hours to spend there this day so we didn't see everything, but I think that was about as long as my kids' attention spans would have held out anyways. We really did enjoy our time here, so we'll definitely be going back to finish checking it out!

Essential Details:
Nevada State Museum
600 N Carson St, Carson City, NV 89701
Website