BOULDER CITY, Nev.—When it was completed in 1936, it was the largest and tallest dam in the United States. Even though Hoover Dam’s height of 726 feet was outdone in the 1960s by the 771-foot-tall Oroville Dam on the Feather River in California, it still holds a No. 1 title. Hoover Dam is the highest capacity water provider for the United States’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead.
According to Crystal Randall at the Bureau of Reclamation, between 4 and 5 million annual visitors seek to experience the jaw-dropping, monumental breadth of the 1,244-foot-wide edifice, set precipitously into a section of the Colorado River and the steep, jagged Black Canyon. Visitors congregate where the southeast corner of Nevada and the northwest corner of Arizona meet.
