Western States (5)

A little about the Hoover Dam.

This thing is ginormous. It was started in 1931 and by 1936 it was producing more than 2 million kilowatts of electricity. The dam itself is more than 700ft high, 1200ft long, 45 ft thick at the top and 660ft thick at the bottom. It contains more than 4 million cubic yards of concrete. It has to be that massive because it's holding back over 9 trillion gallons of water.

One of Hoover Dam's spillways

Mike at Hoover Dam

Me at Hoover Dam

From the top of Hoover Dam

Froma dirty great man-made ediface to a huge hole in the ground...

Kaibab Forest

We spent the night in the Kaibab Forest. It was colder here than expected, around -2C. About 3am a coyote started howling, a couple of seconds later every coyote in the area was - and there were a lot of them! Altogether a cold, noisy, sleepless night.

But here's the reason we were where we were...

Me at the Grand Canyon visitors Center

They mean it. Look at this video. O.K., that was a joke but on average just one person every year fall into the canyon, a very small proportion of people who visit the area.

Deer at the Grand Canyon

One of the rangers told us about the deer at the Grand Canyon. Deer are designed to eat vegitable matter. Every year the ranger shoot around 20 to 30 deer and the reason for this is that people feed them. Unfortunately, what they give them is food meant for humans. A lot of the food we eat has animal fat added to it. There's a bug that lives in the deer's stomach that helps them digest vegitation. Animal fats kill off these bugs and the result is that the deer starve to death. They did an autopsy on one deer they found 6 1/2bs of plastic in it's stomach. The deer was starving when they shot it.

All around the canyon are notices not to feed the animals. Not only is it better for the animals but also for us as well - a lot of the animals in the area have rabies.

This page created 1st September 2011, last modified 6th September 2011