Hoover Dam Bypass

Hoover Dam in Nevada has always been a daytrip destination when visiting Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon. It’s pretty damned spectacular and certainly worth the 40 mile trek (southeast) from Vegas on a clear summer’s day. But right now there is double the bang for your basic travel buck in that you can now observe the two sides of a $240 million bridge as it sprouts seemingly out of shear rock above and in front of the Dam. It is 900 feet over the Colorado River and is slowly taking shape almost before ones eyes. At that height it looks to my untrained eye as about 200 feet higher than the top of the dam. Started in 2005, it should be completed next year but at this point you can easily visualize what it will look like. It’s pretty spectacular as is.

The bridge will be the bypass for US Route 93 that right now crosses the dam itself and creates a traffic bottleneck of the first rank. When complete, it will provide a new and faster link between the states of Nevada and Arizona

It looks like an incredible feat of engineering, almost equaling the dam in that regard. The road will be supported on two massive concrete arches jutting out of the rock face. The arches are made up of individual sections which are being lifted into place using a high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons. At the moment, the structure looks like a traditional suspension bridge but once the arches are complete, the suspending cables on each side will be removed.

They are gambling that the 17,000 cars and trucks that presently cross the dam every day can be accommodated by the new bridge and it will alleviate major hang-ups. I’m not sure that will be the case since the new bridge is so spectacular I think people will want to pull over to take a look, and therefore become a Catch 22 traffic-wise.

The Dam gift shop didn’t have any literature about the new bridge other than a not-very-good postcard. From the postcard: “Although the bridge is known as the Hoover Dam Bypass it is officially called the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, after a former governor of Nevada and an American football player from Arizona who joined the Army and was killed in Afghanistan.”