Hoover Dam

THE BEST WAY TO HOOVER DAM AND BOULDER CITY, NEV. From Los Angeles, take Interstate 10 east to Interstate 15 north toward Las Vegas. Take Interstate 215 east to U.S. 93 south to Boulder City and the dam. Hoover Dam tours, (866) 730-9097, http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/service/index.html . The Bureau of Reclamation has conducted tours through the day since 1937. Visitor Center admission is $8; tours of the power plant and the dam and its passageways vary in price but include Visitor Center admission.

On an unseasonably hot morning this fall, my 11-year-old son and I set off for Hoover Dam, his first time to tour the American engineering wonder that draws nearly 1 million visitors a year. In recent years, I'd visited the dam and adjacent reservoir, Lake Mead, as a journalist who reports on water. But I hadn't been there as a tourist since my own childhood. I looked forward to hearing how the dam's minder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, would tell such a big story to such a big audience.

LAS VEGAS -- In what authorities are calling the first confirmed suicide at the new Hoover Dam bypass bridge, a 60-year-old San Jose woman leaped to her death from the 900-foot-high span Saturday. Federal police had attempted to convince her to step back from a precipice along the pedestrian walkway, but to no avail. The victim was identified as Patricia Oakley of San Jose, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Rose Davis said Tuesday. Oakley's body was found downstream Sunday by Colorado River kayakers.

When she moved here in the 1980s, Carri Stevens was baffled. This is Nevada, so where are all the casinos? she wondered. Where were the one-armed bandits that chime their "ding-ding-ding!" cacophony at seemingly every gas station, restaurant, pharmacy and supermarket? She soon discovered that Boulder City is the only major city in the state where gaming is banned. And locals don't miss it one bit. "Tourists can't believe it," said Stevens, who with her husband, Al, runs the Coffee Cup cafe.

The most striking sight greeting visitors to the Colorado River gorge known as Black Canyon used to be the great wedge of alabaster concrete spanning the canyon wall to wall. But in recent years Hoover Dam, that enduring symbol of mankind's ingenuity, has been upstaged by another sight signifying nature's power to resist even the most determined effort to bring it under control: a broad white band stretching along the edge of Lake Mead like a bathtub ring, marking how far the reservoir has fallen below its maximum level.

HENDERSON, Nev. -- President Obama took a break from his debate preparation to be a tourist on Tuesday, heading to the Hoover Dam in the afternoon for a short tour of the massive monument to public works. Obama's motorcade cruised along the winding roads to the dam for the brief outing. It was the president's first visit, he told a reporter. The president has been hunkered down at a resort in this Las Vegas suburb, getting ready for Wednesday's debate against GOP rival Mitt Romney.

A new bridge soaring across the Colorado River uniting Arizona and Nevada was formally dedicated Thursday, eliminating a 75-mile detour around Hoover Dam. Named for heroes from different wars, the bridge will be the key part of a faster route between Phoenix and Las Vegas. It is the Western Hemisphere's longest single-span concrete arch bridge and one of the highest in the world, officials said. The 1,900-foot bridge, which is 890 feet above the river, is part of a $240-million four-lane bypass that will shift traffic away from the two-lane U.S. 93 across Hoover Dam. It is about 1,500 feet south of the dam and crosses over Black Canyon.

A tour bus overturned on a highway near Hoover Dam on Friday, killing seven Chinese nationals and injuring at least 15 others, the Arizona Department of Public Safety said. Six fatalities were confirmed at the scene, about 190 miles northwest of Phoenix; a seventh person died at a Las Vegas hospital, said police Cmdr. Dean Nyhart. Nyhart said the bus was traveling north on U.S. 93 when it veered left and then right across the median. It rolled at least once before stopping.

Clayton Sellers'voice echoes off the sheer rock walls that rise from his vantage point along the Colorado River in Black Canyon, just downstream from the base of Hoover Dam. "[The dam] was started in 1931 and completed in 1935, about two years ahead of schedule and under budget," he says as he maneuvers a pontoon raft across the water. Sellers' passengers, mostly tourists staying in nearby Las Vegas, are awed by that fact, and even more so by the massive engineering marvel standing before them.

A New Hampshire man jumped to his death at Hoover Dam early Tuesday, hours after calling police to say that he had killed his girlfriend at their Las Vegas Strip hotel room, authorities said. Police received a 911 call about 12:15 a.m. in which a man said police could find a woman's body in a room at the Treasure Island hotel and casino, police Capt. Tom Lozich said. Inside the room, hotel security officials discovered a body.

HENDERSON, Nev. -- President Obama took a break from his debate preparation to be a tourist on Tuesday, heading to the Hoover Dam in the afternoon for a short tour of the massive monument to public works. Obama's motorcade cruised along the winding roads to the dam for the brief outing. It was the president's first visit, he told a reporter. The president has been hunkered down at a resort in this Las Vegas suburb, getting ready for Wednesday's debate against GOP rival Mitt Romney.

Named the among the Travel Channel's “10 Best Helicopter Thrills,” Maverick Helicopters offers V.I.P.-level tours of everything from the Grand Canyon to the Hoover Dam. Experience a nighttime Vegas Strip helicopter tour for $99 and fly over the mega resorts of the Strip, from the Manhattan skyline of New York-New York to the Bellagio fountains to the never-fading light of the Luxor pyramid. Prior to departure from the company's Las Vegas terminal, guests enjoy a champagne toast before stepping inside Maverick's ECO-Star helicopter, dubbed the “limousine of the sky.” Maverick Helicopters 702.405.4300 www.flymaverick.com Win It!

LAS VEGAS -- In what authorities are calling the first confirmed suicide at the new Hoover Dam bypass bridge, a 60-year-old San Jose woman leaped to her death from the 900-foot-high span Saturday. Federal police had attempted to convince her to step back from a precipice along the pedestrian walkway, but to no avail. The victim was identified as Patricia Oakley of San Jose, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Rose Davis said Tuesday. Oakley's body was found downstream Sunday by Colorado River kayakers.

River deltas are among the most biologically productive ecosystems on Earth, and for millions of years the delta of the Colorado River was no exception. After a 1,450-mile journey from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains south into Mexico, the Colorado sustained verdant marshes teeming with life before emptying into the aquatic Eden of the upper Gulf of California. In 1922, the great naturalist Aldo Leopold canoed through the delta, which he described as "a milk and honey wilderness" and a land of "a hundred green lagoons.

Myron Martin was in fourth grade when he attended an opera at Jones Hall for the Performing Arts in Houston. "Our school bus pulled up to the front, and I saw this majestic building, and I knew that we'd gone someplace special," he said of his first encounter with theater. "I happened to sit in the eighth-row center on a mohair seat. Just as the house lights were going down and the curtain was going up, I got goose bumps all over. " That was the catalyst for a career in the performing arts that would take him from Texas to Broadway and, eventually, to Las Vegas.

If visiting Muir Woods, Monterey, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon are on your bucket list, a Mauiva AirCruise can help you cross them off inside a week. The Mauiva AirCruise Western Wonder Experience combines private plane flights on 30- to 70-seat turboprop planes and deluxe motor coaches to minimize travel time.  In seven days, guests visit Monterey, Carmel, San Francisco, Sausalito, Muir Woods, Sonoma County and Yosemite National Park in California, the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Hoover Dam and Las Vegas.

A consolation for tapped-out gamblers in this city of glitter and greed is that with a little gas money or the price of a tour bus they can see mighty Hoover Dam. It's a colossus beside which the MGM Grand and Caesars Palace become dots on the desert. Standing massively astride the Nevada-Arizona line, Hoover and its surrounding attractions, including Lake Mead, are only 45 minutes away from Vegas, but what a difference.

Hoover Dam and U.S. Highway 93 were reopened Thursday after vehicular traffic was halted for two hours to let a bomb squad examine an object found in a parking lot. The object, about the size of a coffee can, turned out to be an ammunition box fashioned into a chalk container with a spool of line. It might have been used to mark straight lines on roads or construction sites, officials said.

EVENTS Third Wednesdays Downtown Culver City presents a festive evening of civic boosterism, with local businesses offering discounts and specials on food, drinks and shopping. Other diversions include live music, open galleries and giveaways. Culver and Washington boulevards between Ince Blvd. and Duquesne Ave., Culver City. 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Free. http://www.downtownculvercity.com . BOOKS Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century Hoover Dam is one of the most physically impressive utilitarian structures in the world.

I am a map lover from way back. As a child, I would hand-copy the continents from an atlas, and even now I can spend too much time on Google Maps seeing how things fit together, or geotagging old photos, pinpointing just where in the world I stood to take them. This is just by way of saying that I am a person who would be more than usually interested in watching something called "How the States Got Their Shapes. " Such is the title of a new, brief series premiering Tuesday on the History channel; it follows and shares a title with a 2010 special, which itself shared the name of a book by Mark Stein, who appears here as a talking head.