Highest Dam

Highest Dam

Boulder (Hoover) Dam, with one shoulder resting on Arizona and the other on Nevada, harnesses the Colorado River at Black Canyon. Third longest river in the United States, the Colorado flows high in the snow-capped mountains of Wyoming and Colorado, zigzags southwest for 1,700 miles, and finally pours into Mexico's Gulf of California. The river's drainage basin covers 244,000 square miles, one-twelfth of the land area of our country.

The Dam, completed in 1936, cost $125,000,000. Millions upon millions of horsepower created at Boulder Dam help run the plants and factories of the Pacific Coast. The dam is 727 feet high, 660 feet thick at the base and 1,282 feet long at the crest. It is by far the highest dam in the world, outranking the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington (550 feet) and the Shasta Dam in California (560 feet). All three of these dams were built by the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior.

For 115 miles behind Boulder Dam is a great inland sea, Lake Mead, large enough to float all the navies in the world. The shoreline of the lake is 550 miles long. The lake grew from the silt-laden Colorado, and every year great quantities of silt are carried into the lake from upstream. There is enough water in Lake Mead, which was nonexistent before the building of the dam, to cover the entire state of New York under one foot of water. The water in Lake Mead at times rises as high as the height of the Washington Monument.