Hoover Dam

I have a really short attention span when it comes to most things. But when it comes to bridges and dams, I'm all ears.

The Hoover Dam has two tour options: the power plant tour and the Hoover Dam tour. The power plant tour is only 15-ish minutes and you never step foot in the actual dam. No thanks. We went for the Hoover Dam tour.

View of dam from the visitor center. Both tours start with a short introductory film.
Many hats have met their fate by falling down to the cliffs.
It is 726.4 feet from foundation rock to the roadway on the crest of the dam. The towers and ornaments on the parapet rise 40 feet above the crest. There are tons of spooky stairways and hallways.On the way to the power plant portion.Our first dam guide for the dam tour.A little leak or sweating. I really, really, really wanted to stick gum in it like Clark Griswold. The power plant room. It was really beautiful and elegant.For a little sense of scale.Awesome doors.Our second dam guide on the dam tour. This is when the two tours split. The power plant group was done and we kept going!Opening the super secret awesome door.Gorgeous terrazzo tile work.Heading down a passageway toward the wall of the dam. You can feel the heat increasing with every step.
Follow the light at the end of the tunnel.
A bunch of people had to duck to make it down the tunnel. Apparently, that wasn't a problem for me.
They let you stick your camera out of those grates to take picture of the dam. Shawn took these. Neither of us trusted me with the whole expensive camera hanging out the side of a huge dam thing.
Different angles as he rotates the camera.
New bridge, still under construction. Currently the major highway goes on top of the Hoover Dam. It's insane. There are tourists everywhere and it's a major highway. This causes huge backups as traffic comes to a crawl.
One last look out the grate.To get to the lookout, you need to cross a metal floor grate. The tour guide said a decent number of people freak out and won't step foot on it, blah, blah, blah, something about the grate giving way and plunging a billion feet to your demise.
Then there are people who like to stop for a photo op on it.It really is scary when you look straight down and your vision fades to nothing.Back into the thick of the dam.
The meeting point of two concrete sections of the dam. The dam sections are actually constructed to give a little bit and shift as necessary. Engineers take measurements at spots like these to see how far apart the two points are. Measurements scrawled on the wall.This metal bar shows that these two sections have shifted. One has shifted back from the other. It's amazing though. You can barely slip a credit card behind it. That's how little it has shifted since construction.
Stairway to heaven.Stairway to hell.Gorgeous elevator doors.Looking down from the top.If you expand this picture, you'll see some huge fish on the upstream side of the dam. Can you imagine how big these things must be to have us spot them from that high above? Two of the four penstock towers from the Arizona side.The overflow spillway. The water has been low for years but if it gets high enough, it spills uncontrolled through this overflow.That is not where I'd want to end up!