Dave’s Midlife Blog

While Red Rock Canyon is a marvelous example of how the Southwest changed over millenia, the Hoover Dam is a Wonder of the World that was built in less than five years.

The dam is on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (We like to tell our friends that we walked to Arizona–across the dam.) It created Lake Mead, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, and it provides irrigation water and electric power to a good portion of the southwestern United States.

The dam is reached by one road and one road only: U.S. Highway 93, which runs through Boulder City, Nevada to the river.

Highway 93 is a two-lane road that goes right over the Hoover Dam. On the advice of the guide books, we got there rather early in the morning. Good thing, too: when we left shortly after noon, the backup on 93 was probably three to four miles long.

To alleviate congestion, a multi-lane bypass bridge is being built over the river, just downstream from the Hoover Dam. This bypass project was originally scheduled to open in 2008, but the collapse of some tower cranes caused the completion to be delayed until 2010.

The bridge infrastructure looks very impressive. The bridge will span the canyon high above the river, as opposed to the current Highway 93, which of course goes across the top of the dam. Here are some of the Nevada-side bridge supports for the Hoover Dam Highway.

We parked our car and walked down toward the dam. It is not that wide, but goes very deep into the canyon. It is a concrete arch-gravity structure.

Looking down into the canyon on the downstream side was rather scary for two people who are mildly afraid of heights. The power plant is at the bottom of the dam. It produces on average more than 4.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year–most of it sent to Southern California. That’s a lot of Hollywood Klieg lights!

On the lake side of the dam are four towers that look like Art Deco sculptures of some kind. They are the intake towers for the hydroelectric plant. They take water from Lake Mead and run it through the turbines at the bottom of the dam to create those 4.5 billion megawatts a year.

You can see from the lighter-colored layer of the canyon walls that the water level in Lake Mead is somewhat lower than its maximum. (This color-leaching reminded me of Red Rock Canyon, actually.) But there are rainy seasons sometimes, and the level of the lake can rise. What happens to extra water when that happens? Well then it goes around the dam to the downstream side via two spillways. These work along with the intake towers to divert excess water downstream. Here is the spillway on the Arizona side.

Several times during our Vegas week we remarked that the city felt like a beach town without the waterfront. So where do Las Vegans go to the beach? Well, they could drive four or five hours to the Pacific Ocean, or they could drive a half hour and get to Lake Mead. The Lake Mead Recreation Area is where Las Vegans go to swim, boat, and generally enjoy the water.

In the places where I grew up, these man-made recreation areas were fairly common. Lake Norman, on the Catawba River north of Charlotte, NC, is the one I know best. Lake Mead, however, is the mother of all man-made lakes. When we flew home from Vegas, Barbara gave me the window seat. I could see just how huge Lake Mead was, until the canyons and gorges of the Colorado River became the Grand Canyon, miles upstream from the Hoover Dam and the lake it created.

One final note: the name of the Hoover Dam was actually a point of some controversy in the mid-20th century. The project was undertaken during the administration of President Herbert Hoover, and was completed under Franklin Roosevelt.

When the U.S. Congress authorized the project, it was originally called the Boulder Canyon Project. The dam was first planned to be built in Boulder Canyon, but as the design developed, it moved to Black Canyon because it was easier to block the river there. The dam, however, kept the name Boulder Dam as the project got underway.

Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior changed the name of the dam to Hoover Dam in September 1930, as Hoover was preparing his re-election campaign. After Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the 1932 election, Harold Ickes, the new Secretary of the Interior, issued a memorandum in 1933 asking the Bureau of Reclamation (the office responsible for the dam) to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. In legislation signed by President Harry S Truman, Congress restored the name Hoover Dam in 1947.

The town closest to the dam is Boulder City, Nevada. I had the impression that many locals still tend sometimes to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. Since we flew to Las Vegas out of Washington National Airport (and not Reagan National Airport, the name imposed on it by a Republican Congress), I can understand why locals might want to use the dam’s original name!