Hoover Dam
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2007
1
45
220
Trip End
Jun 17, 2009
Hoover Dam,
Arizona,
United States
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
We crossed the road in the morning rush hour, I think it was a pick up truck and went to Lilo's cafe for breakfast. Same welcoming, friendly " Good Morning Folks, what'll you have "? We stopped at the Post Office to send some collected photos home to our Expedition Support Managers, John and Dorothy and then hit the road again.
West along I40 and a widening landscape. We were stopped at a Security Check and then waved through. At Kingman we turned NW and it went mountainous again. We eventually stopped at the 'Hoover Dam'. One of us had a sandwich for lunch and one had beef jerky. Well, a man's gotta try what a man's gotta try
Guess Where?
! It was quite chewy but tasty and Crocodile Dundee reckoned we'd encountered worse.I suppose again it's the engineer that wanted to see just what this thing was like. It is impressive and enormous. It is also very low on water level with the recent droughts. We looked at it and walked over it and had to get tickets to the visitor centre to be able to see the downstream face. What we didn't realise is that the full dam visits, which were stopped after 9/11, had restarted 4 weeks ago!!! YES. We went down in a lift to the lower water input level near the base and saw a 30 foot diameter intake pipe. We visited the Nevada generator hall, ( Arizona is on one side of the river and has half of the facilities and Nevada has the other half) and walked a tunnel inside and across the dam, taking a side diversion into a ventilation shaft to peer out over the river way below the dam top.
A fascinating tour.
Back at the top, on the roadway, I looked at both inlet towers, one for each state remember. Each tower had a clock on it and the Arizona clock said 1715 and the Nevada clock said 1615. We were changing back again from Mountain to Pacific time. We drove over the dam roadway, which in the future will not be possible as they are building a new bridge that will bypass the dam and set off to make some more miles.
