Southwest Vacation Feb23 - Hoover Dam
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On our second day in Vegas, we headed east south-east to Hoover Dam, but not before stopping in Boulder City to have breakfast.
Of course, we wanted to take the damn tour, but they don't take reservations. So we arrived right when they opened at 9am. There was a short line but we were part of the first tour group. We bought the package tour that includes the power plan, the dam and the visitors center.
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The highway bridge is a pretty amazing feat of engineering itself.
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| To build the dam, they used cranes and overhead wires. One of the old cranes still exists, the rust-colored structure at right just above that concrete cylinder. You can see a wire stretching across from it. |
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| Looking straight down at the power plant. |
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On top of the dam, in front of one of the elevators. The road on top of the dam used to be the only way across the Colorado, until they built the new highway bridge in 2010.
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| The visitors center is at far left. |
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| PA good look at the visitors center (right) and the parking garage/gift store (left). |
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| About halfway down the dam in the center is a little ventilator shaft/viewing port that we would get to look out of on the dam tour. |
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| A better look at the ventilation shaft/viewing port at center right. |
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The two Intake Towers on the south side. The water enters the intake towers and is routed to the turbines to generate electricity. Plus they regulate the flow of water to the Colorado River below the dam.
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| Notice how low the water level is. |
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Looking at the two Intake Towers on the north side.
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I was surprised to learn that the primary reason for building the dam in the 1930s was flood control. I would have thought generating electricity -- power -- would have been first, but actually it was last. The power is nice, however, to pay the bills to operate the dam.
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Yay, Hoover Dam.
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| A nice diagram showing the layout of everything. The Dam itself is just a part -- a large part -- of the overall system. |
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To build the dam, they had to divert the Colorado River somehow. They did it by building massive tunnels through the rock on each side of the dam. This is one of them although I think the huge steel pipe was added after the dam was built.
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| Another diagram showing the diversion tunnels. |
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Our power plant tour guide explains the system.
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| Walking through one of the original tunnels carved out of the rock. |
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| Looking at one of the power plant rooms with the massive turbines. |
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| A rare sight. One of the turbines has been removed and is undergoing maintenance. This doesn't happen very often. These things are incredibly heavy. They use overhead cranes to lift and move them. |
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Hoover Dam was designed to handle visitors from the start. So they spruced up the place with some floor art.
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| Hoover Dam was built in a place on the Colorado River called the Black Canyon. This is the Black Canyon looking upstream before the Dam was built. |
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Looking standing at the mouth of the ventilation shaft/viewing port.
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| You have to walk through this cylindric tunnel to get to the viewing port. |
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| Walking somewhere deep in the bowels of the Dam. |
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| We took elevators to get down into the Dam, but there are stairs also. Very steep stairs. Here is one looking up. |
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And looking down.
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| A good shot of the Dam from the south (Arizona) side. |
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P45
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We stopped by this one building on the way to the visitor's center. I'm guessing it was the "old" visitors center. It contained this huge 3-D map of the Colorado River area. I found it fascinating because it contains a lot of my favorite flying areas: Green River, Flaming Gorge, Canyonlands, Lake Powell, San Juan River, Grand Canyon, etc.
This was the right side of the map.
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| The center right area. |
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| Center left area which includes Lake Mead and at far left, Hoover Dam. Notice the map shows Valley of Fire at center. |
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We moved over to the visitors center.
This map shows the course of the Colorado River which splits Arizona and California and runs all the way to the Gulf of California.
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| A full scale diorama which shows one of the large buckets they used to transport the cement and then dump it where they wanted. The large bucket was suspended from the overhead cables. |
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Some interesting artifacts from the building of the dam.
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| A fascinating diorama showing Hoover Dam under construction. You can see the overhead wires being used to bring concrete to the work area. |
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| A model of the finished Dam. This model shows the Spillways on each side of the dam. The Spillways are for if the water level ever gets too high. Apparently, water flowing over the top of the dam is a bad thing. Instread, overflow water goes into the Spillways, then into the diversion tunnels, and emptied into the Colorado River on the other side. They've only needed to use them once, and it caused damage to the spillage areas. Right now, their problem is too little water, not too much. |
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| Would you like to know more? |
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Would you like to know more?
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| That's a lot of concrete. |
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Some info on the bridge.
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| Hoover Dam has some good company. |
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| A memorial to a "High Scaler", one of the riskier of the dam building jobs. Being afraid of heights myself, I can't even imagine hanging like this on the side of a cliff, hundreds of feet in the air, working a pneumatic gun on the rock all day. And getting paid very little. They were iron men in those days. |
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| Hundreds of men, and not just high scalers, were lost in building Hoover Dam. In those days, there were virtually no safety regulations or worker compensation or anything like that. It was the depression and the men were happy to have a job. |
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Leaving the dam area, we drove a short distance to a parking lot close to where you could walk out on the bridge.
An interesting placard showing how they built the bridge. There isn't a visitors center for the bridge but there are lots of placards containing more info about the bridge than you ever wanted to know.
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| Out on the bridge. It must be 1,000 feet over the Colorado River. |
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Looking down at Hoover Dam from the bridge.
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Heading back to the parking lot.
We really enjoyed our day at Hoover Dam. It's amazing to me that something so big and complex can be built. And they did it on schedule and on budget. I wonder if a dam like this could be built at all these days, with all the bureaucracy we presently have. So, I recommend driving out to see the dam if you happen to be in Las Vegas. Unless you're on a hot street in one of the casinos. Then continue playing in the casino.
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