Week 29: Boy, that’s for Dam big!

No, that’s not what she said. I’m talking about the Dam, you know the Hoover Dam. It’s that big man made thing that helps save water and creates power for places like...Southern California.

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You know how there are those places that you always say to yourself, ok next time we visit so and so we’ll go there. Well, everytime I visit Las Vegas I tell myself that the Hoover Dam should be on the agenda. This past week, I made sure I did. Visiting the Hoover Dam was on my 50 Weeks to 50 list, and darn it, I was going to visit the damn Dam!

I was in Vegas for business, no really, for the week. My parents had tagged along too. We decided to stay an extra day and take the time to visit the Dam, which was only about 30 minutes away. And if you’ve ever ventured away from the Las Vegas Strip, the rest of the area is well like...most other communities -- new housing developments arising, strip malls, baseball fields, freeways. You know you are close by the Dam when you exit off the freeway and Dam tourist souvenir stores start to spring up. And the streets are lined with fast food establishments. I was tempted to stop by the A&W restaurant since we don’t have any in San Diego.

There’s a short curvy road you take from Boulder City to the Dam, and I notice that they have their own police station which looked to have a pretty large presence. I assume it’s to prevent anyone from causing major damage to the Dam, because that would be a major domestic terrorist attack. You then notice all the electrical poles, then you turn a corner and there’s the Dam.

We pay the $10 to park in the parking garage (where else are we supposed to park), and as we step outside our comfortable air-conditioned car, are immediately greeted by the dry, hot desert air. I don’t know how Vegas folks stand the heat. I guess you get use to it. We hurriedly get into an elevator (the theme of the visit) from the garage to the street level, so that we can take an escalator down to the Visitor Center and get back into someplace with air conditioning.

The longer Dam tour where you get to wear hard hats wasn’t available by the time we get there (I was in seminars all morning, so we arrived in the afternoon), and we have to settle for the shorter Dam Powerplant Tour, which lasts about 45 minutes including a short film documenting the water reclamation reasons for having a Dam, and building of the Dam itself. It was actually very interesting, and we learned that construction took five years, which was two years ahead of schedule, and it created Lake Mead, the largest man made lake in the U.S. They had to build smaller dams and diversion tunnels prior to the big Dam, one of the dams is still buried in the water. Being built during the Depression era, the project helped boost the economy too, and helped develop the surrounding communities. After the film, we are lined up to wait for a large elevator to take the whole group down, down into the Dam facilities. Each group is about 40-50 people, tours run constantly, so lots of people come to visit. I hear many dialects and foreign languages, so it’s a pretty popular Dam destination -- being one of the top manmade wonders of the world.