Mojave: Hoover Dam and Lake Mead

This is the final post of the story of our recent February trip to the Las Vegas area. We saved a trip to see Hoover Dam and Lake Mead for the final whole day in Nevada. As we left Las Vegas for Hoover Dam, we set the GPS for the Albertsons in Boulder City to purchase some water and lunch. Beyond Boulder City, there is a whole lot of nothing, no gas, no food, no water.

Before leaving Boulder City and just a mile and a half from the grocery store, we stopped at Hemenway Valley Park overlooking Lake Mead. It is also known as Bighorn Park because it is an urban location where Bighorn Sheep are known to graze. This park has everything a sheep might want: rocky slopes for protection from predators, lush green grass, and shade trees that are otherwise nonexistent in the Mojave.

Within seconds of pulling into the parking lot, we spied two rams casually grazing on the manicured and irrigated grass right beside the city street. One seemed to be a bit more skittish as we approached to about 40 yards away; the other, marked with a red ear tag, never stopped munching grass. I used my big lens to photograph them without the stress of getting closer, although many cars pulled up quite near them. I wish people would give wildlife more space.

Bighorn Rams Grazing at Hemenway Park

Is There Going to be Trouble Here?

Having sated our need to see Bighorns (we saw them at Valley of Fire and Death Valley previously), we left without looking for any others. Driving down the hill towards the lake, within minutes, we found the road narrowing and twisting, the old U.S. 93 that I remember from my prior trip from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas in which the highway ran across the top of Hoover Dam. It has since been rerouted and access from the Arizona side has been blocked, but more on that in a moment.

Quickly, we found ourselves at the Bureau of Reclamation security checkpoint which I suppose is necessary post-9/11 because Hoover Dam is a secure federal facility. At this stop, you must roll down all windows so the security officers can see in your car, and you must declare any guns or drones. The zero tolerance policy means that if you have guns, you will be turned away. It is illegal to fly drones over Hoover Dam, but it is not clear if you can have them in your vehicle. The dual rear wheel truck in front of us got referred to secondary for a search. We got passed through after speaking with the security officer.

As we wound down the steep hairpin road to the dam, we crossed under a new exquisitely arched bridge that was not there on my last visit, the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, also known as the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge. This bridge that carries the new U.S. 93 and Interstate 11 would come into play in an hour or so.

Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge

After winding under the new bridge, we continued across Hoover Dam to park on the Arizona side. The Nevada parking lots are all paid as well as the very first lot on the Arizona side. If you are willing to walk a couple of minutes, all the remaining parking lots on the Arizona side are free, and we parked in one of those on the far side of the Arizona spillway.

Hoover Dam Crosses from Nevada into Arizona

On foot, we crossed the dam to the Nevada side and back. While we walked, we had lots of time to take in the strong Art Deco influence that speaks directly to the era of the bridge and the thought put into its design and adornment. I am a huge fan of Art Deco styling (think of all the coastal bridges in Oregon and the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building in NYC of the same era as Hoover Dam).

You might not be able to take in the Deco details while driving across the dam, because keeping an eagle eye out for the scads of pedestrians or cars stopping suddenly in front of you will take priority. We saw one idiot stop suddenly on the dam and the following tour bus had to take evasive action, pulling into the oncoming lane to avoid rear-ending the stopped car.

After parking on the hill in Arizona, you will have plenty of sightseeing opportunities starting first with the four beautifully designed intake towers slightly upstream of the dam, two on each side of the river. You will also notice the graceful Deco curves of the Arizona spillway. I noted as we walked across that there are new barriers, shade canopies, and fences that were not here on my last visit, some 40 years ago. It was also obvious that the water level is significantly lower now than it was then.

From AZ, Two Intake Towers Closest to the Dam

The Arizona Spillway
Emergency Overflow in Case of High Water

Art Deco Styling Detail, Arizona Spillway

Clock Showing Arizona Time, Just After 11

Clock Showing Nevada Time, Just After 10

Desert Gold, Geraea canescens, Blooming on Nevada Canyon Wall

One of Two Deco-Styled Bronze Statues
"Winged Figures of the Republic"
Recalls Packard Hood Ornaments of the Same Era

726-Foot High Hoover Dam Face, Looking at Arizona

Elegant Spandrel Columns of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge

Decorative Frieze on the Elevator Tower

There is a lot more to Hoover Dam than meets the eye, most of it down inside the dam itself or in the powerhouses. You can purchase tickets for guided tours, but tours are just not really our jam. We confined ourselves to what we could see from the road. As we did our own tour, Ann kept looking up at the people on the extraordinarily high bridge just downstream and urging for us to go cross it. I kept refusing; I am really afraid of heights and the bridge runs about 900 feet above the Colorado River. (So naturally our rooms in Vegas were on the 32nd and 25th floors.) Ann is the daredevil in the family. I own my fears.

On our way down to the dam, we passed a sign for the parking lot for the Hoover Dam Bridge Overlook. Not knowing that this was the access point for crossing the new bridge, something I really did not care to do, I pulled in. After a short climb from the parking lot, we found ourselves on the pedestrian walkway of the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. Oops. I can say that I made it across all the way to the Arizona side and back, but I was extremely ill at ease especially when tractor trailers rolled by at minimum of 75 mph making the bridge shake. The bridge does offer exceptional views of Hoover Dam.

Hoover Dam from the Bypass Bridge

Arizona Mile Zero, Center of Bypass Bridge

Love These Grasses at Hoover Dam Bridge Overlook

After having made it safely back to solid ground, we continued slightly west before turning right to climb up to the Lakeview Overlook, named quite originally for looking out over Lake Mead. From here, the sadly low water level of Lake Mead is terribly apparent when looking at the islands in the lake. A bonus for me is that I saw my first Sagebrush Sparrow running along the ground, tail erect like a wren, scurrying from one Creosote Bush to another. Unfortunately, I could not photograph it.

From Lakeview Overlook, Low Water in Lake Mead is Obvious

From here, we went to the Lake Mead Visitor Center with an eye towards hiking some or all of the Railroad Trail to pass through the tunnels of this abandoned railway. The line and its five tunnels were put in to ferry materials for the construction of Hoover Dam. We picked the warmest day of the year so far, so we opted not to hike the Railroad Trail because it has no shade and it was already pushing the mid-80s when we arrived. Others had no such qualms; the trailhead parking lot was almost full.

While we were at the Visitor Center, we did walk through the decimated cactus gardens around the building. The lack of water in recent years has killed so much of what was a beautiful garden. The drought even has killed a lot of mesquites and that is a hard thing to do.

Great Plains Prickly Pear, Opuntia polyacantha

Beavertail Prickly Pear, Opuntia basilaris

Ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens

Ocotillos Are One of My Desert Favorites

Common Side-Blotched Lizard

A Pair of White-Winged Doves

Desert Gold, Geraea canescens

Teddy-Bear Cholla Fruit, Cylindropuntia bigelovii

Tree Cholla, Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa

Mojave Yucca, Yucca schidigera

Desert Mallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua

After stopping at the Visitors Center, I had thought we might make a tour of the north side of Lake Mead along Lakeshore Road. From the Visitors Center we could see that Boulder Beach, where we thought we might visit, was not terribly inviting. We skipped it as it kind of seemed pointless. It was hot and we were tired after nearly a week from home and to be honest, after seeing the gorgeous scenery along Northshore Road earlier in the week, Lakeshore was looking like a bust. We made a quick stop at 33 Hole Overlook that did not inspire us. We continued up to the Las Vegas Bay Overlook to see the nearly dried up Las Vegas Wash/Bay, now perhaps a tiny wet spot with some green shrubs.

Las Vegas Bay Seems to be Missing

It was early, perhaps 12:45pm, when we threw in the towel without ever really voicing that this is what we were doing. At our final stop, I suggested skipping the lunch that we bought in Boulder City and reversing our meal plans for the rest of the day. For dinner, we had planned to eat at Shang Artisan Noodle back in Las Vegas. Instead, I suggested we have a late lunch there and then just dine in on our lunch food back at our hotel for dinner. That idea seemed to resonate with Ann. We were both tired.

It was a quick trip through Henderson back to Vegas and soon enough, we found Shang on the corner of a totally generic strip mall. I was shocked when I stepped inside how nicely the interior is appointed and how busy it was. We were some of the very few non-Asians in the restaurant where we took seats at the bar facing the glassed-in kitchen. We watched one cook hand tossing noodles and we watched the other shaving knife-cut noodles into massive pots of rapidly boiling water. It was a great show with our late lunch. I much prefer knife-cut noodles to hand-tossed noodles.

Handmaking Noodles at Shang

Spicy Knife-Cut Noodles with Pork Belly

Spicy Hand-Tossed Noodles with Beef

Pork Dumplings

Two bowls of noodle soup and an order of dumplings was way too much food, so we combined the remains of both soups and took it back to the hotel, where we ate it for dinner. Our original lunch food, we saved for lunch tomorrow before heading to the airport. Back at the hotel, we packed most of our stuff and did not go back out. We did nothing but relax that evening and I caught up on some notes from which I wrote these blog posts.

Tuesday morning I awoke after another 8 hours of sleep on a night before travel. Will miracles never cease? We spent a lazy morning with terribly weak host-supplied coffee of the hot brown water ilk. I took a few more parting shots of Vegas.

New York Las Vegas

Final Shot of The Strat and The Sphere

After eating our lunch saved from yesterday, we started for the airport. Filling up with gas, returning the rental car, security, boarding, and the flight back to Seattle all went like clockwork. We had a beautiful sunset descending into SEA and a temperature shock as we debarked. I put on my jacket for the first time in a week. Getting back to Redmond was a quick 36-minute flight with boarding, taxiing, and deplaning taking far longer than the actual flight. It was so good to hit the shower and our own bed. If nothing else, travel surely makes you happy to be home.