USA – Road Trip – Hoover Dam / Lake Mead – 20th October

We journeyed from Vegas in our Jeep (another upgrade from a compact!) to The Hoover Dam and booked ourselves onto a half-hour tour. It costs $8 for visitor centre admission and an extra $3 gets you on a tour, so we figured we may as well do the tour!

It starts off with a propaganda style 10 minute video explaining how the dam came about, those important figureheads involved and the importance of the Hoover Dam to the surround states. This was followed with a slightly messy group being taken down into the generator rooms and the diversion tunnel areas with an explanation by a witty lady as to how things operate. It was interesting even for Helen! We ended the tour at an observation point on the top of the visitors centre followed by a brief trip around the museum. It managed to fill a good hour or so being there and walking across the dam and back to take in the enormity of the project.

Our journey to Zion from this point would still take a further 4 hours or so and we went through a slightly more scenic route of the Lake Mead Recreation area. More park passes to buy but you get rewarded with constantly stunning views of the landscape. This continued throughout the Lake Mead area and then along Interstate 15, we stopped a few times to take in the canyons we drove through. Red rock was the theme!

We eventually arrived in Zion at our time 7pm but mountain time 8pm, we hadn’t realised the clocks had gone forward an hour. The campsites were full in the National Park and we were informed by the friendly ranger at the south entrance that we’d have to be at the park campgrounds early the next day to get a spot, 8am early!! So we went back into Springdale and found a campsite located as part of the Quality Inn. They had sites for $32 so we took this with the intention of getting into the park early the next day. We were back in our little tent again! The first time in nearly 2 weeks and there we cooked a great camping meal on our one wok stove!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f/2.0, Leica 90mm f/2.8, Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM processed in Lightroom 3)

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