Hoover Dam and the Valley Of Fire

OR

Adventures in the Nevada Desert

After a few days visiting family in Northern California, and a few days in Las Vegas attending a conference by day and wandering the Strip by night, we rented a car for one full day of hitting the road.

Deep within the bowels of Hoover Dam we reached one of two huge rooms housing the turbine generators.  Spotlessly clean.

Another view.  These are both actually slightly blurry.  I keep forgetting to bring my tripod on these trips, although I don't know if I would have been allowed to carry it on this tour anyway.

Here's an establishing shot -- obviously a panorama stitched together from many individual photos.  The turbine generators pictured above are inside the buildings at the bottom of the dam -- in this case, we were inside the building closer to us in our vantage point here, to the side (west) of the dam.

Seven hundred feet above those buildings, you have the top of the dam and the US Route 93 traffic crawling across it, one lane each way.  And swarming with camera-toting tourists, including yours truly.

Below is the view from the top of the dam, looking downstream as the Colorado River, having passed through those turbines above, passes under the new US 93 bypass bridge under construction.  As our dam tour guide said, "we're hoping it'll be done by 2008".  Note: the bridge doesn't crest up as much as shown in this photo, that's an artifact of the panorama creation process.

Looking in the other direction, we have Lake Mead (about 700 feet higher than the Colorado River downstream) and the two intake towers on the Nevada side of the dam (two more on the Arizona side)

 

In the distance, the white banding on the shoreline of Lake Mead indicates the drought that they are climbing out of.  By 2007 the drought had dropped the lake about 100 feet from its normal level; by now it's recovered about half of that so you're looking at a fifty foot tall white band.  The white is from minerals deposited when those surfaces were submerged.

Beautiful Art Deco construction all over.

One more picture from the dam before we move on ...

The golden building built into the face of the cliff is the dam's visitors center.  And behind it you see one of the electrical transmission line towers.  It's leaning over like that because the wires from the left are flying up from below, from the turbine generator building at the bottom of the canyon.  In the distance you see the bridge, which within weeks will probably have the last girders finally in place to span the river.

This is only 45 minutes from Las Vegas, so if you ever get out there, check it out.  If we'd had more time, we (well, I) would have taken the longer dam tour, which gets you deeper into the bowels of the beast.

As it stands, gotta move along ...

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We drove around the western end of Lake Mead -- mile after mile of dry scrub, ringed by scorched mountains, around a lake that appeared lifeless.

Climbed up a hillside near the entrance to the Valley Of Fire state park.  Not a soul in sight, and the silence was deafening.

In a ravine in the White Domes area of the park.  To the right and left are two towering whitish pink hills, with sheer rock faces going straight up.  In the center of this shot, in the distance at the bottom of the hill, are the remnants of a 1960's movie shoot.

You know what you find when you fly to Las Vegas, drive into the desert for 4 hours, and then hike for half a mile through a ravine?  Germans.

One final parting view before we hit the road for the long, desolate drive back to Vegas.

Comments

[Adam]

One of my favorite parts of the country. I've not been to Valley of Fire but I would recommend Red Rock Canyon, which is 30-45 minutes out of LV the other way. Nice ring road with some fun "trails"/excuses to climb all over huge rocks.

[SL]

Nice pix of the damn dam.

[David Naugle]

great images. love to go there.