The downside of planning a trip as far in advance as we did is that things can change in the interim. That’s what happened to us as we left Zion National Park and entered Nevada.
We wanted to stay at Valley of Fire State Park, a site that is as dramatic as its name implies. When setting our route a couple of years ago, the campground in the state park was first-come, first served. So we didn’t need to make reservations.
Little did we know that in November 2023, the park changed to a reservation system. By the time we realized what had happened, all the sites for our time there were booked.
We searched around for an alternative in the area and found the Callville Bay Marina. The site is primarily a trailer park resort, but has about a half dozen RV sites with full hook-ups. Using a discount program known as Passport America, we were able to get a site for just $19 a night.
We arrived at the marina and found the campsite, but we had some trouble locating the office. We ended up walking down to the dock where rental houseboats are berthed on Lake Mead. A kind gentlemen working there directed us back up the hill to where the campground office was located.
We ran into a group of well-endowed, provocatively dressed women preparing to board a houseboat. Mrs. 123 noticed a number of them were wearing clothing from a Las Vegas strip club. We weren’t sure if this was a company outing or someone had hired entertainment for their houseboat cruise. And we certainly weren’t going to ask.
The following morning we drove south along the Lake Mead shoreline to Hoover Dam. Before you get there, you have to drive through a security check point, similar to a border crossing. The agent took a look at our truck and declared, “I can’t see what you have in the back, you’re going to have to pull over.”
So we drove into the other lane where another agent had us open the back of our truck. He took a quick look and sent us on our way.
Just after security, there’s a turn-off where you can walk up onto a bridge and get a bird’s eye view of the dam. When the dam was first built, the highway crossing from Arizona to Nevada crossed the dam itself, creating a bottleneck as traffic slowed. Eventually, they built the bridge to allow traffic to speed on by without stopping.
The view from the bridge offers a first glimpse of how large the dam is. I was surprised to see how calm the water is below the dam. Other hydroelectric dams I’ve seen seem to dump the water out in a chaotic churn. But Hoover releases its water through side tunnels that produce very little turbulence.
We then drove our truck across the dam to the Arizona side. There’s a huge parking garage on the Nevada side, but they charge $10 for parking. Once you cross over the state line, parking is free.
The downside is the lots are pretty full. When we arrived, an RV had been parked across two spots. When they pulled out the car in front of us took their spot. But the car that had been parked next to the RV, decided to park across two spots as well, even though they could have fit into one.
There was a woman in the back seat, so I walked over and asked if she could repark the car into a single spot. But she informed me that she didn’t drive, and the rest of her family was off taking photos.
Eventually they returned and moved the car, trying to explain that there had been an RV double-parked there. It was such a lame excuse. They had no reason to take up a spot and half with their sedan.
We walked back down to the dam to get our tickets for the tour. The dam was built in the 1930s and has an art deco design to the buildings, fencing, escalators and sculptures adorning the structure.
We opted for the power plant tour at $15 per person, half the price of the see-everything VIP tour. The power plant tour first takes you into a theatre that plays a very dated movie showing how the dam was built. The project was primarily aimed at controlling the water in the Colorado River, which had a tendency to flood and wreak havoc on communities downriver, and to provide water for irrigation. Hydroelectric power was a secondary goal of the project.
Congress authorized construction in 1928 and the winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium named Six Companies, Inc.
Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques used were unproven. Before the dam could be built, the Colorado River had to be diverted from the construction site. This was done with four diversion tunnels 56 feet in diameter and more than 3 miles in combined length, dug through the canyon walls, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side.
Since concrete heats and contracts as it cures, the potential for uneven cooling and contraction of the concrete posed a serious challenge. Engineers calculated that if the dam were to be built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would take 125 years to cool. The resulting stresses would cause the dam to crack and crumble.
They came up with the ingenious solution of pouring concrete blocks in five-foot forms. Each form contained steel pipes through which cool river water would be pumped, followed by ice-cold water from a refrigeration plant built onsite, helping the concrete to set faster. When an individual block had cured and had stopped contracting, the pipes were filled with grout.
Despite the challenges, Six Companies completed the dam and turned it over to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.
Our tour then took us to see the diversion tunnels and finally to the power plant room where massive turbines were turned by the power of the water to generate electricity. While there were 17 turbines in the room, only about a third of them were actually functioning.
When we asked the tour guide why, he explained that if water were directed into all of the turbines it would slow the flow of the river. And water management — not power generation — is the main purpose of the dam.
Perhaps the most striking part of our visit was seeing how much water levels had dropped. The west has experienced a long lasting drought, although the past couple of years snow melt feeding the river have been above average.
Nonetheless, you can see how high the water once reached on the walls of the canyon behind the dam, and the dam’s intake towers, which were originally almost completely submerged now stretch high above the water line.
The next day we drove past Hoover Dam again on our way to the Willow Beach Marina on the Arizona side of the Colorado River. There we assembled our folding canoe and paddled a mile upstream to Emerald Cove. The cove is a small notch in the canyon wall that when the sun hits at the right angles illuminates in a dazzling bright green color.
The paddle upstream into a solid breeze was challenging, particularly since we haven’t been canoeing enough to build up our paddling muscles. We were fortunate to find the cave empty when we arrived. Emerald Cove is a popular tour destination and we had heard horror stories about tour groups paddling all the way up there only to find the line was too long and not being able to enter the cave.
The notch could probably fit about 4 to 5 kayaks at a time, so having the emerald-green water all to ourselves was a fitting reward for our hard work getting there. We consoled ourselves on the paddle upstream that the return trip would be a breeze, floating with the current and with the wind at our backs. For some unknown reason, it didn’t turn out that way. It seemed just as hard paddling back to the marina.
We had left the best for last, and our final day in the area, we drove to Valley of Fire State Park. The park is renowned for its red rock and unique geologic formations, many of which can be seen on the Trail of Seven Wonders.
The first wonder is the Fire Wave, a poor man’s version of The Wave in northern Arizona. We have tried numerous times to get advance permits to see The Wave with no luck. (We have plans to be in Page, Arizona next winter, and will try to get permits through a separate system for people applying while in the area.)
The Fire Wave was beautiful although not as pretty as the real thing, at least based on the photos we seen. Geologic processes have compressed the rock into colorful striations that give the illusion of motion within the solid rock.
The trail continues through Pink Canyon, which as its name implies, is a canyon with pink colored walls, and then Kaolin Wash, a slot canyon which narrows to just a couple of feet. The other wonders include rock arches and caves, striped rock and various other geological curiosities.
After completing the trail, we drove to the White Domes section of the park. The short trail there leads past a location where the1966 western The Professionals was filmed. It loops around on a sandy trail through sandstone formations and through a narrow slot canyon.
We had lunch at the trailhead watching clueless tourists feeding the ground squirrels that came begging for food.
Our last stop in the park was at Atlatl Rock, where 2000-year-old petroglyphs were carved into a massive red sandstone formation. The park installed metal stairs that bring you face to face with the ancient artwork. The petroglyphs include a depiction of a hunter using an atlatl, a tool that was used to throw arrows and spears before the invention of bows.
Days: 115
Miles Traveled: 14,575
Next stop: Red Rock Canyon, Nevada
When I visited Atlatl rock with my sister as part of her 40th birthday trip, that day the park happened to be hosting an atlatl competition. It was cool to see atlatls being used.