Bears Across America: The Hoover Maneuver

April 26, 2011 saw the continuing adventures of a bunch of bears on their journey to the wild west of America.  Todays journey brought us from Flagstaff Arizona to Las Vegas Nevada.

In between is a little engineering project called the Hoover Dam.

Visiting the Hoover Dam proved to be the most annoying experience I've had this trip.  The issue is that for some bizarre reason I could not have a dog in my car and park it in the parking lots close to the dam.   I can understand not having a dog walk around the dam, but why the restriction with them being in a parked car?  Government Restrictions I was told.  bah.  So we parked in the far lots, and walked down to check out the dam. The fact that you can walk over the dam and look down, way way down, to the bottom is cool.  Otherwise its a huge chunk of concrete in the middle of a desert.

The dam itself is a pretty impressive piece of engineering, and beautiful in its own way.  It is not a surprise that this is where they kept the All-Spark, and Megatron.

Lake Mead, the lake created by the dam, is also beautiful, tho not as big as I expected.  The drop in water levels as the Colorado River is drained for use in Las Vegas and LA is remarkable (thats the white band you see in the photos).  Just goes to show the hubris of Man to build major cities out in the desert.

After we spent 20 minutes at the dam we headed west again and arrived in Las Vegas in time to put Zeke down for bed.  Las Vegas itself is an amazing place to drive into.  Desert, desert, desert, middle of city.  There is no middle ground :)

Stay tuned for more from our adventures in Las Vegas.