Hoover Dam and Boulder City

We learned something today.  For what ever reason, probably lack of critical thinking, I assumed that after the building of the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, cars would no longer be allowed to drive across the top of the dam.  Not true!  One can drive over the dam.  After it quit raining this morning, we went out to see where the high wind warning signs for the bridge are.  Since we’re further east than the last time we were here and the bridge was denied to us, we wanted to see what the bail out is.  After determining how we would proceed in the event of high winds we decided to go see the bridge walking route.  Again, we thought we’d be parking somewhere and walking over the bridge.

When we reached the bridge, we saw two of these guys sitting on a large platform.  They are the Winged Figures of the Republic.  They were dedicated in 1935.  They have a great arc deco look about them.  They’re bronze, their feet are shiny from people rubbing them. 

After driving over the bridge, we found a place to park so we could look down at the facility.

This is some sort of a crane.  It’s anchored to the rock on the other side of the river.

Here is the other side of the damn.

Although GPS says you can drive up over the hill and exit out the other side of the dam, you can not.  There is a turn around at the top of the hill and the road is blocked.  Dam officials want all traffic going in and out the same way.  Look up the hill to the right of that RV, that’s the road down.  It used to be that all traffic on US93 crossed over this way.  Speaking of traffic, there is a security checkpoint on the way down to the dam.  When we were leaving, the backup to go through was incredibly long.  Get there early!

Our next stop was old town Boulder City.  Pictures we’d seen suggested that it would be cute and foo-foo.  Look at the arch way – they, too, have a Winged Figure of the Republic.

There are cool looking restaurants.

We saw much vintage neon; although we suspect the neon sign for “pool and wifi” is probably new.

Alas, alack, Boulder City was holding an Art in the Park event.  The city was over run with people and their cars.  Parking was impossible so we bailed.  Fortunately, we came upon a grocery store on the way back to the RV park and bought dinner and bottled water for our next stop.  Downtown Boulder City really is attractive, and hopefully next time it will not be over run with art aficionados.

Another view of Lake Mead from US93.

We really enjoyed Hoover Dam.  It was built in between 1931 and 1936.  People did amazing things back then, in the case of the dam they did it two years ahead of schedule.