Hoover Dam: Balanced between Pacific Time and Mountain Time

Hoover Dam

If you’ve seen the movie San Andreas (starring Dwayne Johnson), you might have seen Hoover Dam in it. Remember the time you were at the edge of your seat watching the earthquake that happened at the beginning of the movie — the one where a dam collapses? That’s Hoover Dam. 

Where is Hoover Dam? 
And why you might want to see it:

Hoover Dam dams the Colorado River at Black Canyon on the Nevada-Arizona border.

Early last year when we were travelling from Las Vegas in Nevada to Grand Canyon in Arizona,  it didn’t seem right not to stop at Hoover Dam. So we made a quick detour to this dam that used to be celebrated for its height. At one point this arch-gravity dam was one of the tallest (700+ ft. ) and biggest water and hydel power projects. It is also considered an engineering marvel and sees a lot of visitors every year.

 between two states and between two time zones

The drive to the dam was pretty interesting. Around half an hour out of Vegas, we’d gotten a glimpse of Lake Mead looking a lovely bluish-green. And the rest of the landscape was all brown. The sides of the road as far as our eyes could travel, we saw barren, rocky land. Then, there was this board that said, ‘Welcome to AZ’ and then a few minutes later we were welcomed back to Nevada. 

Lake Mead Highway 93 working its way through the barren and brown rocky desert, which is the home of the Dam

After we’d visited the dam, we would see that we went from Pacific Time Zone to Mountain Time, then back to Pacific. And while we were at the dam, we crossed the state line over the concrete structure there and did another Pacific to Mountain Time. And that was not all. On our way back from Hoover Dam we went from Nevada to Arizona and back to Nevada. Just reading this is quite disorienting, I’m sure. Blame it on the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge that now crosses over the canyon. (Or did our map take us all over the place — I don’t know.) But this route over that high bridge was designed to reroute all the traffic that used to be on the road that goes directly over the dam. Thumbs up, for that.

And then because we were going towards the Grand Canyon, we would cross the state line into AZ one more time, that, on US 93. 😀

Back to some sights from the border of NV and AZ —

Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, Black Canyon and the Colorado River.

You can walk over this bridge and take in the view of the dam and lake from a height of 900ft. but we gave it a miss. We wanted to get to the Grand Canyon before sunset.

Hoover Dam

You can walk over the dam using the sidewalk that runs along the old highway on the dam.

Some Hoover Dam trivia

Did you know: that in 1931 when the construction of the dam began, this project became the first one to require all workers to wear hard hats? (Two years later, Golden Gate Bridge became the second project in the US that insisted on construction workers putting on the hard hat that has since become a symbol of construction workers. 

Nevada Time (PST) on one side of the Hoover Dam…

State line. Note how the states of Arizona and Nevada are marked.

… and AZ time (Mountain Time) on the other side of the dam.

Another shot of Black Canyon and Colorado River over which the Hoover Dam is built.

Linking to Our World Tuesday

P.S I managed to find a clip of the movie I mentioned earlier —

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I managed to find a clip of the part of San Andreas (the movie) that I mentioned earlier–

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