Las Vegas Weekly

You gotta see this: the Hoover Dam Bypass

Photo: Jacob Kepler

Magnificent. Inspiring. Breathtaking. If you haven’t driven over the hoover Dam lately—and by driven we mean inched along at a torturously slow, environmentally damaging pace in traffic backed up to Vancouver—now’s the time to disregard all that, pile in the station wagon and add to the havoc. The bypass bridge is a thing to behold! Take a picnic lunch for the back seat and check out the chutzpah of mankind. Construction on what will be the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is about to hit a significant milestone: The final piece of the supporting arch is set to be placed within weeks. Spanning 80 feet across the Black Canyon just south of the dam, the concrete arch will be the longest in the Western Hemisphere. When the whole thing is complete in late 2010, it will provide four lanes 900 feet above the Colorado. Right now, it’s just an awe-inspiring undertaking of mankind, like the dam itself, or a moon-landing, or building a mob museum in a recession.