St. George, Utah

While visiting the Hoover Dam the other day, we happened upon a great hike.

It’s The  Historic Railroad Trail, originally used to transport materials while Hoover Dam was under construction.

It’s a 2.3 to 3.7 mile trail (one way depending on how far you go) which takes you through 5 tunnels with sights of Lake Mead with a final stop with a sight of the Hoover Dam if you go to the end. There are great views of Lake Mead, and informational kiosks explain the history of the railroad and tunnels.

The highlights of the trail include five tunnels. These tunnels are a whopping 25′ in diameter. They needed to be that big to accommodate the large loads transported to the dam site.

You can see the size of the tunnels as compared to the hikers.

Only a few of the entrances are shored up with timber.

I love how you can see the exit of one tunnel from the entrance of another.
It’s hard to imagine the difficulty of blasting the rock and creating the railway lines.

And at the end of our hike, a HUGE lizard. As near as I can guess, this is a Chuckwalla lizard. This one was about 12″ long, but they can grow to 16″. Yikes!
And I always wonder if lizards look at us and say, “Hideous, just hideous!” 🙂

Lake Havasu City, Arizona

We spent yesterday exploring the Lake Havasu area a bit. Here’s what we learned…

Parker Dam

Lake Havasu is created by the damming of the Colorado River at Parker Dam which is about 150 miles downstream from Hoover Dam. The Parker Dam was built in the mid-1930’s and is “the deepest dam in the world”. It is 320 feet,  with 235 of those feet situated below the riverbed.

Here’s the up river side of the dam:

The dam’s primary function is to create a reservoir and to generate hydroelectric power.

Lake Havasu can store 647,000 acre feet of water which is over 210 billion gallons. The lake is the water source for the Central Arizona Project Aqueduct which provides water for irrigated agricultural areas and municipal water for several Arizona communities, including the metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson.

Back Country Byway

Much of the road on the California side of the Colorado River below the Parker Dam is  Back Country Byway. I had never heard of the term, so, of course, I Googled it.

BLM Back Country Byways serve a unique niche in providing an “off-the-beaten-path” adventure through landscape settings as diverse as the West itself. The BLM currently manages 54 BLM-designated National Back Country Byways totaling approximately 2,952 miles in 11 western states. Learn More.

The drive was very scenic and I’ll definitely be looking for more Back Country Byways…

Patriots and Bible Thumpers

One of the interesting things I noticed on the drive was that on the California side of the Colorado River, we passed about a dozen crosses. They were spaced out along the drive and placed atop mountains and/or rock formations. 

On the Arizona side of the river, there were about a dozen American flags, also spaced out along the drive and placed atop mountains and/or rock formations. (Hard to see in this picture, but it’s there.)

So it almost felt like a Hatfield and McCoys situation only with Patriots and Bible Thumpers… 🙂

Some random shots of our drive.

Lake Havasu City, Arizona

On our drive from Yuma to Lake Havasu the other day we drove through the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground. (None of these pictures are my own, and all of the information is from Wikipedia…)

From Wikipedia:

Yuma Proving Ground is a United States Army facility and one of the largest military installations in the world. Situated in southwestern La Paz County and western Yuma County in southwestern Arizona, U.S., approximately 30 miles north-east of the city of Yuma, the proving ground is used for testing military equipment and encompasses 1,307.8 square miles in the northwestern Sonoran Desert.

Tests are done on nearly every ground combat weapon system.

Over 3000 people work at the proving ground. Surprisingly most of these workers are civilians. The facility, the largest single civilian employer in Yuma County,  pumps over $430 million into the economy each year.

Over 500,000 artillery, mortar, and missile rounds are fired each year. Nearly 40,000 parachute drops are completed. And over 200,000 miles are driven on military vehicles.

While we were driving by we saw a HUGE tethered balloon and a smaller drone circling that balloon. Turns out it’s a TARS (tethered aerostat radar system). It’s so big we saw it from Yuma, 30 miles away.

A small amount of on-site training is done at the facility each year because it provides such a realistic desert training facility.

Props of villages and road systems resembling Southwestern Asia have been built and are used for testing counter-measures to the threat of roadside bombs.

General Motors has recently built a facility here after closing it’s testing facility in Mesa, Arizona, which had been in operation since 1953. The new facility cost over $100 million, and is used to test nearly 80% of the Army’s wheeled vehicles–regardless of the make.

The Yuma Proving Grounds was chosen for its ideal climate and geography. The area gets about 3 inches of precipitation per year and gets at least 350 days of sunshine. It is separated from Yuma by a small mountain range, so there’s little effect on the Yuma residents.

Other countries use the proving ground including Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, France, and England.

NASA has performed numerous tests at the site, particularly for parachutes should rocket launches abort.

About 18 months ago, Marine Corps free fall instructors honored one of their own by releasing a comrade’s ashes mid-air above the Phillips Drop Zone on Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona.

Profoundly sad, patriotic, and beautiful…