Red Roads State Pages

Boulder City

    Hoover Dam

    Over a million visitors a year tour Hoover Dam, the highest concrete dam in the Western Hemisphere. The construction of the dam, completed in 1935, had given people something positive to focus on during the years of the Great Depression. Today, it continues to regulate the flow of the Colorado River and provides a range of benefits, including electricity for more than 1.3 million people and irrigation for 1.5 million acres of land in the United States and Mexico. In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) named Hoover Dam one of America's Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders. In 1984, the National Park Service designated the dam a National Historic Landmark.  In the same year, ASCE designated it an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

    We visited Hoover Dam on March 10, 2003. By about 9:00 in the morning, we were driving across the dam from the Nevada side to the Arizona side, to an uncovered parking area that would accommodate our medium duty truck. That enabled us to view the dam and several of its structures as we walked across it to the visitors center. There are four large intake towers, two on each side of the river. (Only three are visible in my photo.) Here is a close-up photo that gives a better indication of the size of these towers. (Notice the people.) In the middle of the dam is the state line marker between Nevada and Arizona. 

    At the visitors center, we descended below street level to purchase tickets for the Discovery Tour. After an introductory presentation by a guide, we were escorted to the viewing area balcony above the generator room. Then we spent time on our own viewing the indoor exhibit halls. There were film clips, photos, dioramas, and artifacts (such as this  wrench) related to the construction of the dam and the lifestyle of the workers. From inside the visitors center, we looked out over the dam and Lake Mead to the north. From the observation deck on top of the center, we watched the  Colorado River continue on its way south.

    Only part of our four-hour visit to Hoover Dam was spent in the visitors center. In the Old Exhibit Hall, we saw a large relief map depicting the Colorado River along with the dams from Colorado to the Mexican border. It was interesting to locate some of the places we had already visited in the Colorado River basin, including Brawley, Palm Springs, and Death Valley in California, and Yuma in Arizona. There was a program associated with the map, where locations were highlighted with light to correspond with the recorded narration.

    The areas immediately surrounding Hoover Dam itself contain many architectural, design, and art features dating from the time of the building of the dam. These seem rather "fancy" for such a utilitarian structure, but they were designed to symbolize the contemporary view of the dam as a spectacular achievement. Rather than try to describe these features, based on my brief visit, I'll recommend you read about the sculptures and star map at the Hoover Dam website.

    A fairly recent (July 2000) addition to the art at Hoover Dam is the  High Scaler statue. This sculpture is in honor of the builders of the dam, represented here by the figure of a high scaler. These brave construction workers dangled by ropes on the side of the deep canyon, hundreds of feet in the air. Their tasks included setting dynamite charges and knocking away loose rock after the blasts. They had to handle jackhammers and other tools while suspended. An article at the Hoover Dam website tells more about these courageous workers and their dangerous job.

    After leaving the site of the dam, we drove through the Lake Mead National Recreation area. We stopped only briefly, at Boulder Beach, along Lake Mead.          

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