17. The mighty man presence of Boulder Canyon.
The Hoover Dam was instigated for water distribution, not hydroelectricity. Built to provide water to seven states in the west and the desert southwest. Built for flood control. Built to make Vegas, Phoenix, L.A., and other desert-located cities possible. Built to make an unlivable regions livable for American human beings.
The Hoover D is a concrete arch gravity dam, stands 760 feet, 1,244 feet across, 45' thick at the top / 660' at the base, utilizes 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete, and was once the worlds largest concrete structure
(1st surpassed by the grand coulee of the Columbia,
(internet borrowed phot0)
and recently by the Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtze River in China)
(internet borrowed phot0)
Beyond Boulder Canyon, the Colorado flows small and salty down to Yuma, AZ then on into Mexico. A handful of laws have been since passed to improve the water quality flowing into the Mexico. The Mexican Water treaty of 1944 first recognized problem, and more recently laws have been passed to reduce the salinity of water flowing into Mexico. This link to the Arizona Dept. of Water Resources further describes problems and attempted solutions:
http://www.adwr.state.az.us/dwr/ColoradoRiverManagement/Water_Quality.html
Corey and I passed a security check point
then drove across the dam to the tire squeaking new garage park
I took a short clip of the howling rubber on the fresh wax:
We toured the outdoor walking routes, photographed from the faux-stone the vistas, then elvevator'd and escalator'd down for a tour.
The placards and video verbage of the $30 hard-hat tour paint a bountiful beauty of the pure beneficence of this 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete construction. The absolute courage and strength of man over nature.
Hoover Dam Designations
*One of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World
(American society of Civil Engineers)
*A monument of the Milenium
(American Society of Civil Engineers)
*One of the top ten construction Acheivments of the 20th Century
(Construction Industry Manufacturers Association and International concrete and aggregates group)
*National Historic Landmark
(United States Department of the Interior)
*National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark
(American society of Civil Engineers)
*One of America's seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders
(American society of Civil Engineers)
We walked the bowels with a group of about 20 folks from about the U.S. & Canada
generator room and water intake pipe
vent tunnels and tour-guided snapped photos
The tour ultimately belched us back to the dam top where the Colorado rolls into the four columnus intake towers that extend up from the blue water.
the doily moving subaru
and the gift shop
The current attention gripping construction project stretches it arms from opposite rims of the highest reaches of the canyon. The bridge will join Arizona to Nevada 900 feet above the Colorado River and allow traffic to flow quickly from one state to the next bypassing the dam.
Power towers carried the current out of the canyon as we rolled toward the largest man-lake and Las Vegas.
America's largest manmade lake, Lake Mead, was created by the damned Colorado. With lake mead, the H.D. is able to provides a vast water recreational escape from desert heat for motor boats, rooster-tailed jetski's, off road auto touring, and r.v. parking
The H.D. video described it :
"Born of the collected waters of the Colorado, it could cover the entire state of Pennsyvania to the depth of 0ne foot."
We camped free on the desert earth near the lake.
We walked the trash ridden shore of the lake and watched all the auto trailers slurp up their boats and jet skis from the water at dusk.
A truckload of Spanish singing men drove down and around the sandy desert hills howling out laughter and song at 4 in the morning.
In the a.m. we drove through the Muddy Mtns. into the Vegas valley.
