MARK WAITE / PVT Candy Lohneis, of Beaver, Wash., at front left, and other friends from the Pacific Northwest share a moment outside their motor homes at Preferred RV Resort. Advertisement

Ray Messner of Eugene, Ore., said he usually leaves his rainy home in the Pacific Northwest to head south around Nov. 1.

"This year, because the rain was coming on the first, we left early," Dolores Messner said. "I made my reservations here a month before we came."

The Messners pulled their 32-foot Gulfstream Sun Clipper into the Saddle West RV park, next to the casino on Highway 160, one of the steady stream of snowbirds visiting Pahrump in this peak season.

Messner said he's been coming to Pahrump for three years. This year they would only stay one week in town before heading to Yuma, Ariz., and El Centro, Calif., for three months. They normally stay a month at Terrible's Lakeside RV Resort, but Messner said they didn't have cable access there for watching Oregon football games.

"We like it here. We have friends we worked with," Dolores Messner said. "It's great and it's a fun place to go to," her husband added.

The sign read "park full" at the space reserved for the campground host.

Saddle West General Manager Ryley Young said the restaurant gets a little more business at the casino in the winter months, as well as the bingo hall, which he said was "definitely an area that is a snowbird favorite.

"The RV park is either at or near capacity from now until the beginning of February," Young said. "It picks up in October, depending on what the weather is here and what the weather is up north."

Young said winter visitors like the Messners pay close attention to the weather here and back home in making their plans. He said some snowbirds leave Pahrump in January for the annual show in Quartzite, Ariz.

The Saddle West has 80 RV slips available. A few rigs were parked in the overflow area, waiting for a spot.

Although it's located on a parking lot, Young said probably 60 percent of the guests are staying on a monthly basis.

"One of the nice features of our park that attracts a lot of people are the spaces are all paved and level. The spaces are double wide and the majority of them are pull through. So for a lot of folks it's a lot easier for them to pull in and hook up. It's easier to get to. It just makes it simple for them and then also our location here on the highway makes it easier for the shorter term guests, the ones that are just going to pull in, stay for the night and pull out," Young said.

Marvin Snyder of Marshall, Minn., was playing pool with a couple buddies in the recreation room at Preferred RV Resort.

"We spend seven months here," Snyder said. "I like the weather and it's a pretty decent park here. I've been coming here for about seven years now."

Snyder said he pays $240 for the membership, good for a 35-day stay, then there's a surcharge of $2.50 per day. Snyder said he plays in a lot of pool tournaments, while together with his wife, they run pinochle tournaments.

"We get here about the middle of September. We like to get here before there's any snow on the mountains, you know, in Denver."

His wife Char was working on a suntan outside by the pool, next to a thermometer that read 74 degrees.

"We love Pahrump. We love the sunshine and we love the people," she said. "You have the most sunshine after Yuma, Ariz.

"Our December and January in Minnesota, it's below zero there, snowing and blowing," she said.

Tony and Kathy Shivak of Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada, were making their maiden voyage in their 39-foot Adventure Winnebago. Kathy Shivak was logged onto her Yahoo account on a laptop computer.

The Shivaks said they left at the beginning of October. They've been traveling south in the winter for five years now.

"We're members here at the park, and so we'll be going home for Christmas. We'll leave on the 29th of November and then we'll be back probably near the end of December," Shivak said. "We'll be gone around a month and then we'll spend a little time here, maybe around a week, and then we'll head further south."

The Shivaks plan to spend part of the winter in the San Diego, Calif., area. "Then we're back here for the month of March," Kathy Shivak said.

"We stayed here a couple of years on our way through. We liked it and decided to buy a membership. Pahrump was just little at that time. It's really growing, unbelievable," Tony Shivak said.

The Preferred RV Park was doing its usual booming business this time of year. Other travel trailers and RVs bore names like Bounder, Nomad, Pace Arrow, Cedar Creek, Lakota, Chieftain, Southwind, Allegro Bus and Discovery. Many had satellite dishes perched out front, often barbecues and folding chairs, sometimes bicycles.

Betty Ahlstrom, manager of the resort, said the Shivaks' pattern is typical, as many winter visitors arrive in the fall, leave over the Christmas-New Year's holidays, then return in January.

"October is one of our busier months. Then November, and then when the holidays come in, it quiets down a bit, but then it gets busy again in January until April," Ahlstrom said. "March is the busiest month of the year for us traditionally."

People begin arriving around Oct. 1, in time for the annual Pahrump Fall Festival, she said. Preferred RV Resort is a membership club where members can stay up to 35 days. Some members have been coming down every winter since the 1980s, she said.

Ahlstrom said most winter visitors at the park are from the Pacific Northwest or Canadian provinces.

"At this point in time we're probably about 90 percent full," Ahlstrom said. The park has 275 spaces. The expansion of Wulfenstein's RV park a block over is needed, she said.

"We need all those sites when we're full," Ahlstrom said.

Harry and Jean Marenbach of Seabeck, Wash., said Pahrump is a nice town; they've been coming here for three or four years. The Marenbachs heard the scuttlebutt in the community about the snowbirds first hand.

"My wife found that out the other day. She was in a line at Albertson's and they had a sale, a three-hour sale. It was a long line and the lady behind her said, 'Yeah it's all these snowbirds.' And she said, 'Yeah I'm one of them.' We spend money here," Harry Marenbach said.

They stayed in previous years at Terrible's Lakeside and at Western Horizon Resort's RV Park next to the Pahrump Winery. They bought a membership at Preferred RV Resort this time, where they meet other friends on their migration south.

"Our friends Jessie and Bobby, they're all over here," Harry Marenbach said. "Several of our friends come here when you're going to Yuma or Mesa or Palm Springs. They stop off here for a week and we spend some time together. We're going to leave here in January and then we go over and pick up a couple of people near Gila Bend, Ariz., and take them into Mexico for a week. We always go down there over Martin Luther King weekend. They have a chili contest."

The Marenbachs attend church at the First Southern Baptist Church in Pahrump. Jean Marenbach knits quilts at the Quilted Dragon (last year she donated six quilts at Christmas time). They like Pahrump because the cost of living is low and they're only one hour from Las Vegas.

"Everybody in Pahrump is impressive. They're all friendly," Jean Marenbach said.

Harry Marenbach likes the Pahrump Museum and events like the annual powwow this weekend.

The Marenbachs will put on a lot of miles on their 36-foot Winnebago Horizon Itasca, towing a Honda CRV pickup behind. They'll swing through Yuma and Palm Springs before heading back north in the spring. But no one this winter is complaining about gas prices.

"We don't look at it that way. It's a lifestyle and we're senior citizens now, so we take advantage. How many years now are we going to be able to do something with the money anyway?" Harry Marenbach asked.

Across town, the mobile homes and travel trailers were lined up at Terrible's Lakeside RV Resort, which received a terrific boost in 2004 when the magazine Good Sam Trail Life rated it the No. 2 RV resort in North America.

"Boy, what a boost that gave us. We've been rating in the top 10 since we opened," Terrible's Lakeside Resort Manager Roy Ingram said. "A good indication of how busy the town is, is when the Terrible's Town south parking lot starts filling up with RVs. Then you know it's busy."

The parking lot south of Terrible's Town Casino held as many as two dozen rigs recently.

"We've been running close to 100 percent capacity since the first of October. We will remain busy all the way through about the middle of May. That's usually when the last of the snowbirds go home," Ingram said. "We only have so many sites and we've been discovered several years ago. We turn away dozens of people."

The resort occupancy is down about 7 percent this year, he said, which he attributed to concern over fuel prices earlier in the year. But a steady stream of RV'ers was pulling into Terrible's Lakeside as Ingram gave an interview.

"In December and January we'll slow down. Those are our coldest months. Then once February hits they come back and we'll be 100 percent occupancy from February and March until May," Ingram said.

The majority of the out-of-staters arrive from the Pacific Northwest, he said.

John Estill, a full-time RVer driving a 40-foot Alpha Seeya, plans to stay in Pahrump until after Christmas. "I don't like the cold. It gets a little cold here but not bad," he said.

But Estill said he liked his surroundings at Terrible's Lakeside RV Resort better than RV parks farther south in Arizona and California.

"It's too crowded (there). There's plenty of room (here) between these spaces. Some of the places you go, you can reach out and touch the other motor home. You can't even put down an awning," Estill said. "This is the best place in all the traveling I've done, and I've been to a lot of places."

Kari Frilot, Pahrump Valley Chamber of Commerce executive director, said the chamber targets RVers by advertising in the quarterly magazine RV Journal, using grant money. They also advertise in Nevada Magazine.

"We're no longer a place to go on your way somewhere else. We're actually a destination where they come and stay," Frilot said.

Candy Lohneis of Beaver, Wash., said they left Washington state with their Discovery motor home in September, ahead of the recent flooding. They were staying at Preferred RV Resort.

"We have neighbors that have moved here permanently and we just hit it going down and then coming back. The park is a real nice park and all the people that work here. We do enjoy it here. We really like it and of course the casinos love us. We contribute. We remark every year when we come down how much it (Pahrump) is growing," Lohneis said.