Peach Springs,AZ to Las Vegas, NV

It was dull and overcast when we got up this morning and the weather got worse as time went on. It rained quite heavily as we drove north towards the Hoover Dam. We later discovered that there was a number of weather alerts for flash floods issued for the area we were driving through that morning.

The Hoover Dam is located between Arizona and Nevada on the Colorado River. Lake Mead, which formed behind the dam is the largest man-made reservoir in the Western Hemisphere.

We accessed the Dam by driving over the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge ( see photo below) whose total length is 1905 feet, making it the longest single-arch bridge in North America. At 880 feet over the Colorado River it is the 2nd highest bridge in the USA and the highest concrete-arch bridge anywhere.

During the Depression in the 1930s, thousands of men and their families came to Black Canyon to
build the Hoover Dam and tame the Colorado River. It took them less than 5 years in this harsh and barren land to build the largest dam of the time.

We visited an interactive exhibition about the amazing engineering feat of building this dam. We then walked across the dam in the lashing rain and looked at Lake Mead on one side and the Colorado River hundreds of feet down on the other side.

The weather improved and we resumed our journey to Las Vegas but by the time we checked in to our hotel on the Strip clouds reappeared and it rained for most of the evening. This was not the start - weather-wise we expected to experience in the desert city of Las Vegas.

View from our hotel window.

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