Southwest Vacation
Part 5: Henderson NV and Hoover Dam

(Note: Clicking on any image in this travelogue will bring up a full screen version of the image.)

Tuesday, September 12
Jerome AZ - Henderson NV

So today was the long drive. Our destination was Henderson, Nevada, just a little south of Las Vegas, which we would use as our base point for a visit to Hoover Dam. But there were one or two interesting stopovers along the way.

We stopped for lunch and a tour of Grand Canyon Caverns in Peach Springs. Grand Canyon Caverns is the largest dry underground natural cave complex in the US, and perhaps in the world. By "dry", I mean that unlike most cave systems where ground water has dissolved limestone to produce voids in the rock structure, there is no active water currently at work in the system. So the cavern is pretty much stable and unchanging, and there are no stalagmites and stalactites.

(By the way, my favorite mnemonic to remember which is which is that it's like ants in the pants: The mites go up and the tights come down. Close parentheses.)

They were discovered in 1927 by a man named Walter Peck, who, after filing a prospectors claim to the caverns and failing to find gold in them, marketed them as a tourist attraction. In the 30s the WPA enlarged the facilities as part of the effort to put people to work during the Depression. The facilities have since been expanded to include a restaurant and motel.

The basic public tour is quite civilized, and easy to negotiate. With access by a large elevator (Photo 010), and passages enlarged and paved, and provided with sturdy railings (Photos 030 and 040), most of it is even wheelchair accessible. The temperature is a constant 57°F, and humidity 2%. There are, however, other areas in the Caverns, not included in the general public tour, where guides will lead more serious spelunkers through more technically challenging areas of the Caverns. Those same guide are the ones that lead the public tours. And consequently the tour was mercifully free of kitchy touristy silliness, and rich in serious geological and historical information. (Well, there were the two lost cave men shown in Photo 050, but they didn't make a big thing of it.) In 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US Government designated the Caverns as a fallout shelter, with supplies for 2,000 people (Photos 060 and 070). They're still there. And the low humidity and temperature makes for such a good environment for storage that they're still edible. (I wonder if they also kept any wine there.). Another entertaining feature is the Honeymoon Suite (Photo 080), which is an unusual adjunct of the above-ground motel. It is a most exclusive, (and expensive) facility. When they close up for the night, they shut down the elevator. And when you turn off the lights, it gets dark. (They gave us a short sample.).

Back on the road, our route took us past Kingman, AZ. Jenny's father was stationed at Kingman Air Force Base during his service during World War II before she was born. So she wanted to stop by and see what, if anything, remained of that facility. We pulled off I-40 in Kingman, and followed signs to a Kingman Airport there. It seemed to be a typical rural commercial airport with a landing strip for private and commuter aircraft, and various terminals for DHL, UPS, and other shipping services. Driving along the service road, we saw nothing of the massive military facilities that existed there at the time of Jenny's father's service. But we stopped at the one-counter passenger terminal, and poked our noses in.

And sure enough, there was a pretty extensive display of memorabilia from that time. The primary purpose of the base had been gunnery training for the crews of the big 4-engined bombers that took part in the Allied air campaign over Europe. There were framed photographs of rows and rows of B-17 Flying Fortresses and other WW II aircraft. And there were scrap books showing photos of the extensive barracks, administrative buildings, and repair and maintenance facilities that occupied the grounds at the time. There were black-and-white panoramic photographs of aircrews all sitting on the wings of their aircraft before they shipped out. It was of great interest to Jenny in presenting a picture of her father as a young man just out of his teens in a situation that was to be a major event of his life. And it was also of great interest to me as a a buff of aviation of that period.

In addition to active airport air transport operations, Kingman is also the site of a gigantic aircraft "boneyard" to which scrapped obsolete aircraft are brought and stored. They are either cannibalized for parts or broken down and recycled for scrap metal. The low humidity of the region minimizes the inevitable deterioration that might occur to the planes. Had we the time, I might have enjoyed poking around that facility until Jenny got bored out of her mind. It's just as well we didn't have the time.

We hit the road, and shortly turned off I-40 onto US 93 North for the long straight slog to Henderson, just short of Las Vegas. Again that long-stare aspect of Southwestern American motoring hit me, as the road became a treadmill of desert and scrub vegetation that passed beneath our wheels as our vehicle sat stationary beneath an endless blue sky. It brought to mind a Norman Rockwell painting I once saw, depicting a "typical" American family on an outing on just such a road. Viewed from above they are all in a mid 50's convertible with the top down, two kids in the back seat making some kind of ruckus, mom in the passenger's seat frantically pointing back at the exit they've just passed, and screaming at dad, who is sort of hunched in the driver's seat reading the sign before them that reads, "Next exit 65 miles. No U-turn".

As we crossed into Utah, we finally saw some change in the road's elevation and direction, and the great strands of high voltage power lines indicative of the massive electrical power station at Hoover Dam, tomorrow's destination. We pulled into our next lodging around 8:00. This was a large private home in a recent development that Jenny had arranged for through VacationRentals.com, a competitive service to AirbnB. The facilities at this lodging stood in stark contrast to our cramped quarters in Flagstaff. Here we had not only an enormous master bedroom suite to ourselves with built-in bath and shower, but full run of the house, with use of kitchen and other facilities. We arrived just as the family was sitting down to dinner, and our host, Reynaldo graciously invited us to join them.

The family consisted of Reynaldo, and a large collection of offspring and extended family, but no "woman of the house" that I could discern. I never really got clear in my head how everyone was related to everyone else. But it appeared to be a remarkably well-adjusted family, with kids happily pitching in on the cooking and cleaning chores all posted on a calendar chart on the kitchen wall, applying themselves to homework with a will, and in general being so cheerful and polite that it was a little disconcerting. Reynaldo himself was a real go-getter, managing that house and several other rental properties, being an Uber driver, and sleeping on a pull-out couch in the living room while the kids all had their own rooms, and we occupied the master bedroom suite. I couldn't have been more delighted with his hospitality and the transient company of his family.

Wednesday, September 13
Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam is one of the great engineering accomplishments of the 20th Century. It was built by a conglomeration of private contractors called "6 Companies", and funded by the Federal Government during the Great Depression. Its triple purpose was putting men to work, providing a source of water for development of huge tracts of land in the arid Southwest, and providing electricity for that same area. It radically altered the landscape of the area by creating Lake Mead upstream of the Dam. And it made great swaths of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California inhabitable for a growing population. The story of its construction is the subject of countless books and documentary films. And it has always inspired the engineer in me. And the Dam itself is hugely impressive visually, and quite beautiful in my eyes.

Back in the mid 90s, Jenny had spent a summer with the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, and I went out and visited her for a week. I had flown into Las Vegas, arriving there early in the day. And my plan was to rent a car, drive east to visit Hoover Dam, and then drive up to Cedar City to meet Jenny in the afternoon. Well, I picked up a nice little compact at Alamo Rent-a-Car, and struck out for Hoover Dam. I got about a mile when the engine died and refused to restart. I pushed it into a convenient gas station, and called Alamo from a pay phone. (No cell phones back then.) I asked them to come with another car and pick me up. "No, sorry. We can't spare a person do to that right now. We'll get there when we can." "How long might that be?" "We really can't say. Maybe an hour or two."

I blew up! I was 5 minutes from their &%^@#!! office, and one of their cars failed, and they couldn't spare a person to come get me. So I locked my luggage in the trunk, picked up my guitar in its heavy flight case, and lugged it back to the Alamo office in 110°+ temperatures. Needless to say, by the time I got there I was steaming in more ways than one. I barged into the office dripping sweat, and loudly let every customer in the place know what sort of vehicles they could expect from Alamo Rent-a-Car, and what sort of customer service they could expect when said vehicles crapped out. I must have been a sight! They managed to find another car, and someone to take me to the disabled vehicle, retrieve my luggage, go back to the office, and fill out the rental form, and send me on my way, glad to be rid of me. But by that time it was too late for me to take my side trip to Hoover Dam. Needless to say, I've never patronized Alamo since.

And, needless to say, I was really looking forward to finally getting to see Hoover Dam some 20 years later. And so it was with great anticipation that I pulled into the parking lot, and we hiked over to the Visitor Center. The Dam is a big juicy target for potential sabotage and terrorism, so security is pretty rigorous. We went through X-ray and bag searches. (There is a road along the top of the dam, which we did not take. I wonder if they do a search of every vehicle that crosses.) When we finally arrived at the gate, we found to my dismay that one of the elevators that took tourists to the inner workings of the Dam and the power plant was broken, and we would not be able to take the tour. Rats!