After booking out of the hotel in Las Vegas we had most of the day before catching a flight to New York. We hired a car to drive to the Hoover Dam and into the dessert around.
Its a huge iconic structure, a tremendous piece of engineering; 700 ft high, 660ft thick at the base, 60ft thick thick at the top, completed in the 30's. Couldn't resist driving along the top to Arizona and then back again into Nevada.
The white line you can see around Lake Mead is 56ft high and shows the peak water level, apparently the authorities would like the water to be half way up to the line but low rainfall has meant that this level has not been reached for 10 years and it was 37 years since it reached the peak level.
We saw marinas on Lake Mead - its 110 miles long - that had had to be extended into the lake to reach the water and launch sites that had been left high and dry. The way the work had been done suggests that they don't expect the water level to return to normal for a very long time.
It was strange to have a huge man made reservoir in the middle of the dessert.
The fish in the lake are enormous!
We later drove into the dessert, tremendous feeling of emptiness and silence, not even birds making any sounds, despite only being 40 miles from Las Vegas.
Its a huge iconic structure, a tremendous piece of engineering; 700 ft high, 660ft thick at the base, 60ft thick thick at the top, completed in the 30's. Couldn't resist driving along the top to Arizona and then back again into Nevada.
The white line you can see around Lake Mead is 56ft high and shows the peak water level, apparently the authorities would like the water to be half way up to the line but low rainfall has meant that this level has not been reached for 10 years and it was 37 years since it reached the peak level.
We saw marinas on Lake Mead - its 110 miles long - that had had to be extended into the lake to reach the water and launch sites that had been left high and dry. The way the work had been done suggests that they don't expect the water level to return to normal for a very long time.
It was strange to have a huge man made reservoir in the middle of the dessert.
The fish in the lake are enormous!
We later drove into the dessert, tremendous feeling of emptiness and silence, not even birds making any sounds, despite only being 40 miles from Las Vegas.
Overnight flight to New York to Look forward to now.
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