Our dam guide was Kris for the hour-long dam tour that took us into the dam bowels to walk through dam tunnels seeing dam stairs, looking out dam vents and riding on dam elevators. Enough dam jokes?
I’ve been over the Hoover Dam or bypassing Memorial Bridge many times in my life and even walked on it once, but I’ve always wanted to go inside to take the dam tour. Now I have, and it was worth the wait.
One of the most interesting things about the Hoover Dam is that it was built with visitors in mind. Public tours of the engineering marvel began right when it opened. This is the reason for the art deco motifs and details found both inside and outside of the dam.
There are a few options for experiencing the Hoover Dam. You can visit the dam from the outside just driving or walking across for free (if you park on the AZ side, $10 parking in the garage in NV). The next level up is a visitor center admission. This requires going through security and paying a small fee to watch the video, go through a very nice exhibition about the dam and going up on an overlook with narration about the dam. The next two options take you into parts of the structure.
The power plant tour is open to people of all ages and takes visitors into the Nevada power plant and into a diversion tunnel. This is the most frequented option since numbers aren’t really limited and they happen all day. It is 30 minutes and fascinating because you actually get to see the dam at work.
The dam tour is the most comprehensive option. In addition to the power plant and visitor center, people on the dam tour get to go inside the actual dam. The two additional stops on this tour include a tunnel that leads to an air vent on the side of the dam and the end of a corridor where the dam stairs go from top to bottom more than 700 steps. Finally, the tour takes visitors up to the top on the historic Nevada elevator.
A few interesting bits of trivia I learned on my dam adventure:
- The dam is free-floating, meaning not attached to the sides of the canyon, so that in the event of an earthquake it won’t be damaged by the moving rock walls.
- This means the dam stays in place by the pressure from Lake Mead pushing on it.
- No one is actually buried inside the dam! After learning the construction method and process it is very easy to see that people wouldn’t have been buried inside the concrete.
- The concrete is still curing – the dam was made of enough concrete to create a 4-foot wide sidewalk around the Earth’s equator. It is expected to be done curing around its 135 birthday.
Unfortunately, all of the great pictures I thought I captured were a figment of my imagination. Only when I was in the power plant on the tour (after walking out on the dam and going to the visitor center) did I realize I had no memory card in my camera. At that point I started using my dad’s phone for the rest of the tour. Other pictures were taken by my sister.
The Hoover Dam is an engineering marvel and one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. It is essential to life in the Southwest as it provides water and some power to Southern California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. Without it some of the largest cities in the country would not be some of the largest.
I will leave it up to you to decide whether that’s the way it should be or not. My personal feelings are very pointed about how we try to control nature. To me one of the biggest jokes told at the dam is the name of the bureau that oversees it. In what way is building a massive dam and flooding a series of canyons and valleys and controlling the flow of a mighty river reclamation? What exactly are we reclaiming and who or what are we reclaiming it from?
Anyway, off my soap box for now. The dam is an amazing feat of human ingenuity, innovation and power. It is an impressive sight both outside and in. I recommend you join the more than 49,000,000 people who have visited the dam since it opened.
Be sure to go through the exhibit in the visitor center to learn about the building of the dam and what it is used for. There are interactive displays and lots of interesting and engaging information. A walk across the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is also essential to a dam visit as it gives you a vantage point to look down at the dam and see the reservoir behind it.
Oh, and be ready for the dam humor. It isn’t just in the movies. The tour guides enjoy, and rightly so due to the reactions they get from it, telling their dam jokes. And, no, I didn’t get a dam t-shirt; I got a dam patch.
