According to NPS, Hoover Dam is as tall as a 60-story building. It was the highest dam in the world when it was completed in 1935. Its base is as thick as two football fields are long. Each spillway, designed to let floodwaters pass without harming the dam itself, can handle the volume of water that flows over Niagara Falls. The amount of concrete used in building it was enough to pave a road stretching from San Francisco to New York City.
The dam had to be big. It held back what was then, and still is, the largest man-made lake in the United States, Lake Mead. The amount of water in the lake, when full, could cover the whole state of Connecticut ten feet deep. Only a huge dam could stand up to the pressure of so much water.
Building such a mammoth structure presented unprecedented challenges to the engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation. It stretched the abilities of its builders to the limits. It claimed the lives of 96 of the 21,000 men who worked on it.
Construction began in 1931. Americans began coming to see the big dam long before it was completed four years later. Most had to travel many miles, at the end through a hostile desert, to reach this location on the border between Nevada and Arizona. The builders soon constructed an observation platform on the canyon rim to keep the tourists away from the construction site. Hoover Dam did, and continues to do, all the things its supporters hoped it would. It protects southern California and Arizona from the disastrous floods for which the Colorado had been famous (although during the drought of the last few years, there has been no real threat of flooding from the Colorado River). It provides water to irrigate farm fields. It supplies water and power to Los Angeles and other rapidly growing cities in the Southwest.
I took the Power Plant tour offered for $15, although in my opinion, it was definitely among the less interesting tours I have taken on this trip to date (and I highly doubt it would have been significantly better had I opted for the $30 Dam tour). This was my tour guide.
I highly recommend going to see the dam at least once, since it is an engineering marvel, but feel the tours are not worth paying for at all. That said, here are some photos before, during and after the tour.
Our first stop upon arriving to the dam site was at the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. These are photographs taken from the bridge.
From there we travelled further into the dam site and found some free parking (just past the paid parking). As we were walking down to the visitor's center we passed by one of the spillway tunnels shown below.
Here I am standing on the Arizona - Nevada state line
After an introductory video at the visitor's center we descended into the dam to see the power plant structures.
After the tour I ascended to the observation deck of the visitors center for some more views of the dam.
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