WHERE IS THE DAM GIFT SHOP? HOOVER DAM, NEVADA

Monday, June 28th, we left Kingman, Arizona, took US 93 to get to Hoover Dam. It was a 90 minutes drive. I don't remember if anything eventful happened on that drive except seeing the temperature kept getting hotter and hotter. It was 115 when we were purchasing admission tickets at 4:59 p.m. for the last tour of the day.

Hoover Dam was the biggest man-made masonry marvel to surpass the Great Pyramid of Giza. The dam is made of more than 5 million barrels of cement and 4.5 million cubic yards of aggregate – enough to pave a standard 16-foot-wide highway stretching from San Francisco to New York City.

Hoover Dam was originally known as the Boulder Dam project and named after the 31st President of the United States, Herbert Hoover. It was started in 1931 and completed in 1935, during the Great Depression, and two full years ahead of schedule.

Hoover Dam is 728 feet high (70-story building), and at the base is 660 feet thick (a little over 2 football fields).
I enjoyed the powerplant tour, especially seeing the massive generators, walking thru the tunnels and standing 600 feet above the Colorado River, the view from the observation desk was impressive. Be careful not to touch the handrails, at 125 to 140 degrees under the sun, it could burn your palms.

This striking figures, a pair of 30-foot bronze statues, are called Winged Figures of the Republic, were sculpted by Oskar J. W. Hansen, a Norwegian born, naturalized American artist. The statues were formed from sand molds weighing 492 tons.

I highly recommend putting Hoover Dam on your Bucket List, a must visit and must see.

At the end of the tour, we had just enough time to visit "the dam gift shop". Being an engineer, my husband had to obtain a piece of history, a piece of the original copper transmission line that carried electricity between Hoover Dam and Los Angeles beginning in the 1930's. In 2002, to make room for the new Hoover Dam bypass bridge and highway, several transmission line towers in the vicinity of the dam were relocated and the original high-quality copper cable was replaced.