The New Bridge at Hoover Dam

The O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge, the new Hoover Dam bypass.

After my business was done in Las Vegas, Mary and I had planned a short vacation visit to the Grand Canyon, with a stay in Flagstaff, AZ.  On our way there, I'd planned a stop at the Hoover Dam so that we could take the tour - I'll post about that tomorrow, and so that we could check out the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge on US 93, which was opened in 2010 to replace the old route over the dam.

A view of the bridge from the pedestrian approach -
showing the handrail and the walkway.

The first photo of the bridge was taken from on top of the dam - where the old route went.  Here you can see that the bridge is only 1,500 feet downstream from the dam, and crosses the Colorado gorge at a height of 800+ feet. One of the attractions here - something I didn't know if I could handle - is that there is a walkway on the side of the highway that runs the length of the bridge.  The second photo below shows that feature - Mary and I walked out about halfway.

My final picture with this post is the incredible view of the dam you can see from the walkway.  They have included a lot of interpretive information along the walk up to the crossing - construction and engineering project data, including schedules, amounts of material used, and the firms involved.  Working for a couple of large engineering firms in the past, I enjoyed that part almost as much as they walk across the bridge itself.

The view of Hoover Dam from the new bridge.

We also took in the tour of the dam - that will be my next post.  In the meantime, if you want to know more about the bridge, here's the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_O'Callaghan%E2%80%93Pat_Tillman_Memorial_Bridge