Sharla and I started fairly early this morning for parts west.  We stopped for just a few minutes (or so we thought) at Hoover Dam, and ended up taking the tour of the powerplant, the turbines, and the dam itself.  The visitor center is very well set up, with lots of helpful people to tell you (numerous times) where you need to be 15 minutes before your tour starts.

The tour was very interesting.  Only about half our of group of 40 had signed up for the WHOLE tour (which includes walking through 2 tunnels in the dam itself), and we were set apart by plastic yellow hardhats (that weren’t really all that hard, but they were definitely all that yellow!).  At the appropriate time in the turbine room those without yellow hats had to go back upstairs, while those us us who did have the correctly colored hats were ushered into the dam.

Hoover Dam was built between 1931 and 1935, and is 700+ feet tall, 45 feet thick at the top, widening to over 660 feet wide at the base!  It is honeycombed with tunnels and ventillation shafts (some of which we walked through).  We actually got to look out through a ventillation vent cover from the inside that is 260 feet up on the face of the dam.  On the way over to it we had to walk across a 10 foot long metal grill that covered a 300 foot deep tunnel straight down under our feet.  The grid was pretty coarse, and you could easily see all the way down as you walked across it; pretty spooky.  One lady couldn’t bring herself to walk across.

At the other end of one of the inspection tunnels (which they use to keep track of the hundreds of small cracks that are in the concrete walls of the dam, just to make sure that they don’t get any wider), was a stairway up that they called “The Stairway to Heaven” (400 feet up in one narrow curving flight at a 58 degree angle), and right across from it was “The Stairway to Hell” (which goes down 311 feet in one narrow curving flight at a 58 degree angle).  While I was looking down the Stairway to Hell, tragedy struck:  my yellow hardhat slid from my head and came to rest about 5 feet below me in an alcove, beyond my reach to recover.  But they let me finish the tour after all (I guess they don’t like leaving tourists up in the dam!).

After the tour, (3 1/2 hours after we arrived)

Sharla and I started down the road, and decided to stop at Barstow, out in the desert west of Las Vegas.  Tomorrow we plan to take the backcountry highway to Yosemite and then head for the Sacramento Valley.

Thanks for your prayers!

Love to all,

Pastor Will & Sharla