Hoover Dam

What you see

The dam is a wall of concrete curving across a deep canyon, with the green water of Lake Mead on one side and the river running out below on the other. It stands more than 700 feet tall from the canyon floor to its crest, thick at the base and narrowing toward the top, so the scale only registers once you look down either face. You can drive or walk across the crest, peer over both sides, and read the displays at the visitor center about how it was built and how it works.

Above the dam, the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge carries the highway across the canyon. A pedestrian walkway on the bridge gives the classic overhead view of the whole dam, and it is free to walk out onto. Many visitors pair the bridge walk with the dam crossing.

Why it was built

Hoover Dam was built to tame the Colorado River, which used to swing between destructive floods and low flows that left downstream farms and cities short of water. Construction ran through the early to mid 1930s, carried out by a consortium of firms under a federal contract, and the project finished ahead of schedule. The result controlled the river, created Lake Mead as a vast water store, and added hydroelectric power for the wider region.

It was a defining public-works effort of its era, employing thousands of workers during the Depression and pushing concrete construction to a scale not attempted before. The crews placed concrete in interlocking blocks cooled by embedded pipes, because a single pour that large would have taken decades to set. The visitor center exhibits walk through that engineering story, which is much of what makes the stop more than just a viewpoint.

Tours

There are three ways in. The self-guided visitor center covers the exhibits and overlooks. The guided power plant tour takes you down by elevator to the generator room, where the turbines still turn out power, and includes a short look at the dam's history and workings. The longer guided dam tour adds tunnels and passageways inside the structure, including a vent that opens onto the downstream face, and it is sold on-site only, not in advance, so it can run out.

Interior tour slots are limited and the dam tour is first come, so arriving early in the day matters if you want to go inside. Bags are restricted on the tours, so travel light. The visitor center and tours run daily on a fixed schedule, with the last tour well before closing, and they close on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even without a tour, the free crossing, the overlooks, and the bridge walkway fill an hour or two on their own.

Getting there and parking

Hoover Dam is about a 45-minute drive from the Strip, southeast on US 93 past Boulder City. There is no public transit, so you need a car or a guided tour. A parking garage on the Nevada side and some free lots farther out sit near the dam, with a fee for the garage, and parking fills on busy mornings.

Security checks apply on the approach, and large vehicles face restrictions. The dam straddles the state line, so the two ends sit in different time zones, worth noting when you check tour times. Many visitors combine the dam with a wider tour that also takes in Lake Mead or continues toward the Grand Canyon, since it lies on the route southeast, and a stop at the bridge parking area lets you walk out for the overhead view without paying the garage fee.