These photos were taken from the Mike O’Calllagahn – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. I used the older Nikon D3300 body and the zoom lens. The damn is open again for viewing, but with limited access. Photos never do the dam any justice as you really can’t grasp the sheer size of Hoover Dam without actually being there!
Beautiful Hoover Dam
Welcome to Nevada!
A bit closer view
Incredible this dam.
Thanks! It’s an amazing thing to stand on the dam and look down the slope!
Those dams are impressive.
Thanks, Anneli! Have you visited this dam?
No, not that one, but I’ve seen some others; Chief Joseph near Bridgeport, Wanapum (not sure of the name of the dam, but it’s by Vantage, WA), and I’ve seen Grand Coulee and the little dam at Coulee City.
What a remarkable structure! The history of the construction is fascinating.
Thanks, I totally agree! To stand atop the little sidewalk and peer down the slope is an amazing experience! And the technology available at the time was nothing like we have today either, wow!
It is a big dam.
Hi Tim, it’s a beautiful dam! I miss being there… There are much larger dams but this one is ours, haha!
We have Elephant Butte Dam 150 miles south of Albuquerque. Built between 1911 and 1916, it was the largest irrigation dam ever built with the exception of the Aswan Dam in Egypt. It was the largest dam in the USA until Hoover dam was construction.
I’ve never seen this dam. Tim, I’ll look it up soon. đ
We also have Cochiti Dam, a large earthen dam (11th largest of its type in the world), which is 40 miles north of where I live: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti_Dam
Thanks for the link, it sounds like a very large dam, and about my age too. I looked up the Elephant Butte dam too, it’s a biggy!
The 1980s was a very wet decade for New Mexico. All the dams filled and flooding occurred. Water flowed over the spillway of Elephant butte dam in 1987. I saw the water rushing down the spillway. It was impressive. We’ve been high and dry for the past 25 years, and Elephant Butte lake has shrunk so that it’s now like a large pond. Sad.
That’s very sad! It sounds like Lake Mead with its huge bathtub ring, as white as can be, Tim. i think the lake was last at full pond in the 1980s. Not good! We need some really serious snowfall in the Rockies to help the lake fill.
It looks like water went over the spillway of Hoover Dam in 1987, also. There was a mysterious plunge recorded in the level of Lake Mead after an earthquake in 2015, but it was later changed as a government error. This graph is interesting: https://arachnoid.com/NaturalResources/image.php?mead