The life trail continues to the Wombi Rock. A landmark along the trail is a 55-foot-high simulation of the Taughannick Falls, an infamous obstacle in the tribe’s migration. This so-called “life trail” alludes to the Mohegan’s southward migration to the region many centuries ago. While the first phase was designed to represent the tribe's past in a literal way, the second phase (1999–2002), anchored by the Casino of the Sky, interprets the tribe’s modern history and future in a more abstract architectural vocabulary: large curved laminated wood trusses, for example, reference the local forests and frame a 90-foot-high, two-story retail corridor connecting the old and new casinos. Imagery, colors, and Mohegan cosmological symbols associated with each season are the decorative themes for the space and serve as orienting devices. Organized in a circular plan, the Casino of the Earth was divided into four sections, representing the four seasons. Stone partitions referenced the area's rocky soil, while faux log trellises and hide-strewn canopies evoked traditional Mohegan building types (wigwams and longhouses). While the exteriors maintained the existing industrial aluminum cladding of the UNC facility, the interior expressed the land and culture of the Mohegan people.

In its first phase (1995–1996), anchored by the Casino of the Earth, forty percent of the existing 650,000-square-foot UNC facility was demolished, while the remaining sixty percent was incorporated into the 630,000-square-foot complex, designed by Brennan Beer Gorman with interiors by the Rockwell Group. In 1995, the Mohegan Tribe purchased and remediated the land, once a Superfund site, to build the casino complex. Located on the ancestral home of the Mohegan Tribe, the site once housed the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC decommissioned in 1990), which assembled nuclear fuel components for submarines built down river in Groton. Some viewed potential casino jobs as the region’s immediate economic savior.

Locally, the Mohegans gained political support in the 1990s as a result of massive layoffs in the then defense-based economy of southeastern Connecticut. The legalization of gaming on federally-recognized tribal lands in 1988 led to the proliferation of casinos nationwide. Both casinos’ explosive growth are a result of their location halfway between the major population centers of the Northeast megalopolis: Boston and New York. Situated on a waterfront site in the rolling hills of southeastern Connecticut and within two hours drive of twenty million gambling-age adults, the Mohegan Tribal Nation’s Mohegan Sun is one of the largest casinos in the world, and second only in the region to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s Foxwoods in nearby Ledyard, Connecticut.

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