Frankly My Dear I Do Give a Dam: The Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam. Unfortunately that visit fell in November 2001 and the Hoover Dam was pretty much closed to everything but straight drive through traffic in the wake of September 11th. I returned in November 2002 determined to finally visit.

The Hoover Dam had been reopened earlier in 2002. Unfortunately they had greatly modified the tour, no longer permitting people to visit the base of the dam or much of anything interesting. Instead the new tour concentrates on educating visitors through a series of movies, lectures, and exhibits rather than by letting us actually see anything of interest in operation.

Even so, the Hoover Dam is an engineering marvel worth visiting. Even when all you could do was look, it was worth visiting (and if you prefer, you can still choose to just walk or ride across the dam and enjoy the amazing views).

The Hoover Dam lies along the border of Nevada and Arizona and can be entered from either state. It's about a thirty minute ride from Las Vegas and thus an easy day trip for anyone vacationing in Sin City. If you don't have a car, numerous bus tours depart from Vegas daily. However you enter the dam area, you'll now need to go through a security checkpoint. The guards may just wave you through or they may stop you, ask some questions, and ask for identification. My friend and I came from the Nevada side and passed through that checkpoint without being stopped. However, we drove past the dam and ended up turning around in the Arizona checkpoint. When the guards saw that, they stopped us and asked us why we were turning around. They were satisfied with our answer - that my friend wanted to show me the view from the Arizona side of the dam and some of the flora and fauna nearby - and waved us back out without any further questions.

The parking area and visitor's center are on the Nevada side, but most of the best views of the dam are on the Arizona side. The road through the dam area circles around several times, getting ever higher, providing better and better full dam views at each of three successive overlooks. Surprisingly, although the dam itself was fairly crowded when we visited on a Saturday afternoon, very few folks seemed to go much beyond the visitor's center and the immediate dam area. The scenic overlooks were empty. If you visit, don't make the same mistake they did. It took us no more than ten extra minutes to drive up and stop at each overlook and they were definitely worth the slight extra effort to visit.

One thing to note is that the Hoover Dam is technically within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area but it's operated by the National Reclamation Service rather than the National Parks Service. That really surprised me, although on reflection I'm not sure why - the Hoover Dam may be a tourist attraction but its primary purpose is still to provide electricity for much of the Southwestern United States. In any case, don't expect your NPS passes to work at the dam.

I think parking was $5 for the day but I must admit I forgot to jot down the amount so I'm not 100% positive. It was definitely in that general vicinity though. I do remember it being a flat rate regardless of how long you stayed at the dam. The lot is on the far Nevada side - it's the first dam structure you pass when coming from Las Vegas - and fairly close to the visitor's center.

You can walk around for free or take an official tour for $10 per person. Each tour is capped at about 50 people so if the dam is busy you may have to wait a bit before you can get in. Although business was brisk during my visit, there weren't extensive waits for tour spots. I think we waited about 15 minutes between the line to buy tickets and the wait for the actual tour to start. We got into the first tour that started after we arrived.

Rather than assign a tour guide to lead you through the entire tour, each stopping point had its own ranger who concentrated on that particular element of the tour. This was both a good and a bad thing - it gave us the chance to get the impressions of many different people, but it also meant that when we got a particularly good guide we lost her at the next stop. Getting a bad guide after a good one was almost worse than getting saddled with a bad guide for the entire tour (perhaps not, but it certainly was a huge letdown, and now we knew what we were missing).

The first leg of the tour consists of a 25 minute movie on the building of the dam. It not only covered the design and construction, but the reasons for building the dam and the politics involved. Although I knew construction was dangerous, it really didn't sink in until I saw archival film of folks hanging by ropes down the mountain with sticks of dynamite. Even more incredible, they had almost no casualties, finished early, and finished under budget.

The movie was very interesting but don't expect spectacular film making. It's mostly patched together from archival footage from the 1920s and 30s. It's grainy, it's black and white, and it's jerky (remember, the person taking the pictures must have been hanging off the side of the mountain too, at least part of the time). Still, this was one of my favorite parts of the tour.

The second leg of the tour offers a short talk on the Department of Reclamation, its role in the government, and how the Hoover Dam fits in. Some of the material was already covered in the movie and the rest really seemed very "rah rah go us, we're so great" rather than truly useful or interesting to the visitor. It struck me as the "this is why you should convince your congressman to give us more money" section of the tour. To add insult to injury, the tour guide leading this section (and remember, it was essentially a speech) could hardly speak English. I'd tell you to skip this section of the tour except you can't leave your group.

The third stop was the only stop that gave us the chance to see any part of the working dam (as opposed to the scenic dam). We were led down an elevator to a long dark cave-like tunnel. At the end was a large balcony overlooking the end of the power generator room. The guide for this section was good and gave us an interesting talk on how the power generation works, how often the generators run, and how they decide how much power is needed, but it was difficult to see much of the generators themselves from our vantage point. It was sort of like sitting in the upper level seats behind the basket at a basketball game where all the action is taking place on the other half of the court. You can kind of get interesting glimpses of the ball now and then but for the most part you have to rely on the announcer to tell you what's going on.

The fourth leg was probably the nicest one. The last stop in the main visitor's center, the observation deck floor also has a few small exhibit rooms filled with video presentations showing dam construction, living conditions for workers, the political wrangling needed to successfully initiate the dam project, and other related information. Much of this was already covered in some detail in the first movie, but this section goes into more depth. This area also had some artifacts from the construction process, informational panels showing the new water flow, and a quiz section that offers multiple choice questions on things covered in the original movie and in this set of exhibits. The exhibits were fairly nice but not spectacular. There was enough repetition that I didn't want to sit through everything (rare for me) and the various video monitors were close enough to each others that sometimes you found yourself listening to two or even three at once, having to mentally sort out which one applied to what you were watching. The area could have been designed better, and perhaps rather than the repetitious exhibits we could have had a bit more original material. There also weren't any guides around in case of questions - the one guard in this area was monitoring in and out access to the observation deck.

The observation deck itself offered the best view of the bottom of the dam. Several stories above the top of the dam and inset a bit, this area overlooked the interior. Buildings at the bottom looked very much like matchbox cars, and you could really see the power of the water better here than elsewhere. Unfortunately this was the closest we got to the bottom - they no longer allow anyone to go down.

From the observation deck, you leave the visitor's center but there are technically a few more stops on the tour. The next stop is in front of a large winged man statue sitting on top of an artistic rendering of a star chart. According to the tour literature you'll find a guide there to talk about the artistic concepts but we didn't. Rather we found a few benches and a lot of running kids. The star chart was very out of proportion and the artist made some odd choices in deciding which stars to label and which not. I found myself somewhat indignant over the liberties the artist took at first, but once I got over that I enjoyed looking around.

The old exhibit hall displays photographs. Lots and lots of photographs. They're supposed to mainly be from the construction era, and from what we saw from outside they were basically still versions of the movies in the main visitor center. My friend and I decided to skip this section.

The last stop is at either the Nevada or Arizona intake tower. Basically, there's a short walkway out from the main dam road that you can walk and stand along. This time the promised guide was there, standing in front of the tower, but her five minute talk on the power of water and hydroelectricity was very superficial and boring. I still recommend visiting the intake towers because they offer a very different perspective on the dam itself and probably the most beautiful views of Lake Mead (as opposed to the dam).

I found the tour extremely disappointing. They obviously put it together very quickly so they could offer visitors something post-September 11th, and I appreciate the effort. However, I really wish they'd spent some time weeding out the redundancy and perhaps offered movie versions of the tours they no longer allow you to take so you can still see some of the inner workings of the dam. That said, the dam itself is breathtaking and well worth visiting. Two stars for the tour, five for the dam.

For More Information

Paradise Found Tours maintains a website for Hoover Dam at http://www.paradisefoundtours.com. The site provides information for hoover dam tours, special news, fees and other pertinent information.

Other valuable resources

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