Welcome to the next installment of our Summer Vacation Road Trip.
In this installment, my guy and I finally make it to the Hoover Dam!
Driving from Barstow, CA (see my previous post), to the Hoover Dam which straddles Arizona and Nevada took us about 2 and half hours. Give or take the hour timezone difference between the 2 states.
Hoover Dam is an engineering marvel!
If you haven’t been here, you really need to make the trip. This is one enormous engineering marvel. Especially if you think about the fact that they built this dam in the early 1930s! Yes, they built this thing during the Great Depression! With none of today’s technology to help put it together. No computer design, no super fast data analysis, just good ole’ American ingenuity.
Thousands of people worked on the dam, many lives were lost in it’s construction. On March 1, 1936 it was turned over to the Federal Government, 2 years ahead of schedule. Originally named Boulder Dam it was renamed Hoover Dam by a joint resolution of Congress in 1947.
The generators provide power to Arizona, Nevada and California.
Not too long ago they also built a sky bridge (Hoover Dam ByPass) that cars and pedestrians can use to cross over the dam. Before the bridge, folks had to take an alternate route or actually drive over the top of the dam. You can still drive on the dam for fun, but if you just want to get to the other side, take the sky bridge. The views are amazing from up there. Or, take them both like we did!
Excuse the silly hat, it was the desert after all!
Stay tuned for the next leg in our journey where we head to Moab, UT with a stop off in Hurricane.
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