Nevada

Way down in southern Nevada, on the border with Arizona, lies Hoover Dam. It creates Lake Mead, supplies water to Las Vegas, and produces electricity for Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. It was a huge construction project (the largest concrete structure in the world at the time), built in the depression of the 1930s. Laborers flocked to the project, even though the work was hard, summer temperatures were extreme, and wages were slim.

Lake Mead is currently only fifty percent full, and has been dropping ten feet a year since 2000, due to reduced flow of the Colorado River, which in turn is a result of diminished snowpack in the Colorado mountains. If the drought continues, Las Vegas will soon suffer a severe water shortage, and Lake Mead — the largest man-made reservoir in the U.S. — will dry up entirely by 2021, according to researchers.

Political trivia: The dam was originally named Boulder Dam, after a planned location in Boulder Canyon. The name stuck, even when the project was relocated to Black Canyon. Then, as construction began, the name was changed to Hoover Dam to honor then-president Herbert Hoover, who had played an important role (as Secretary of Commerce) in getting the project started.

But Hoover lost the 1932 presidential election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, quickly removed Hoover's name from the dam and reverted it to Boulder Dam. It was fifteen years later, after Ickes had retired, that Congress, by near-unanimous vote, restored the name Hoover Dam, the name by which it has been known ever since.

California

Early in April I arrived back in my home town for my high school class's reunion and was delighted to be there. It was three days of joyous partying, eating, drinking, reminiscing, taking photos, and posing for photos, accompanied by music from our high school years. It was a blast.

Arizona

South of Tucson is the Titan Missile Museum, the only Titan missile silo open to the public — a real 1960s missile silo with a real Titan missile (sans fuel, sans warhead) in it. A guided tour takes you underground to the control center, which was staffed 24/7 and was always ready to fire the missile if the order from the president ever came (and thank goodness it never did). They even demonstrated how to launch it — one officer turns this key over here, while simultaneously another officer turns that key over there. Then there's the walk down the underground tunnel to the silo itself, where you can look in and see the Titan, poised for takeoff. The missile is huge — a hundred feet tall, ten feet in diameter — and the payload was a nine-megaton atom bomb, the largest used in a missile, targeted somewhere in the USSR. You can understand the part Titans played in the Cold War's "balance of terror" or "mutually assured destruction" policy which successfully kept us and Russia from firing a single missile.

Heading north, we drove Interstate 19 and noticed that the road signs show distances in kilometers, not miles!

East of Flagstaff we came upon the Arizona Meteor Crater. Have you visited it? Even heard of it? No? Well, it's worth seeing, because it's four thousand feet in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. In human terms, there's room for 20 football fields in its bottom, and if the Washington Monument were placed in it, the top would be level with the crater's rim. They figure the meteor was 150 feet wide, weighed a million pounds, and came screaming out of the northeast sky at 40,000 miles an hour when it impacted with the equivalent of a 20 megaton bomb. Formed fifty thousand years ago, it's quite well preserved, with little erosion (this part of Arizona has little precipitation) and no glacial bulldozing (Arizona wasn't overrun by glaciers as Minnesota was). Recommended.

New Mexico

Carlsbad Caverns

I've wanted to see the Carlsbad Caverns for a long, long time. My parents never took me there as a kid, and none of my own travels had taken me close — until now.

The Carlsbad Caverns are way down in southeastern New Mexico, and, in my opinion, are a real gem of the National Park system — well presented, well preserved, well staffed. You follow a path that leads down, down, into the huge mouth of the cave, enter the cave, and gradually leave daylight behind. Ahead are the famous stalactites and stalagmites, softly lighted for your viewing pleasure. On and on you walk, with something new around each bend in the path. Finally you arrive at the Big Room, which really is big — a quarter of a mile from end to end, with a high ceiling — and it feels so astonishing to realize that you are there, seven hundred feet underground, in such an enormous cave filled with such amazing stone formations. When you've had enough amazement, they let you ride an elevator back up to the surface.

Roswell

Why did I visit Roswell? To see the UFO museum. You see, on a summer day back in 1947, something landed in the desert outside Roswell. A rancher found the wreckage, and brought people to see it. The local paper reported on the front page that a UFO had landed. The Air Force took charge, cordoned off the area, confiscated all the wreckage, and whisked it away for examination. The official announcement was that it was just a weather balloon that had crashed, but people who had seen the wreckage (and even handled it) said it didn't look like a weather balloon to them. Then everything about the investigation was classified Top Secret and anyone who had seen the wreckage was visited and sternly warned never to talk about it. No one has been able to pry loose any information from the government — even though it's been sixty years since it happened. So the big question remains: Why the secrecy? What did they find that they still can't release to the public? Roswell folks continue to believe that it really was a UFO, and folks everywhere else believe the "weather balloon" story and chuckle about the whole affair.

Alamogordo

White Sands is home to the Air Force's missile test range, where missiles have been launched since right after World War II, when captured German V2 rockets were shipped there for examination and testing. There's a nice space museum with lots of artifacts from the missile and space programs. A photo on display captures Dr. Werner von Braun at the moment of his surrender to the allies at the end of WWII, and he's relaxed and smiling. A full-size model of Sputnik, the size of a basketball, is pretty underwhelming today, although it was quite something in 1957, when Russia put it in orbit. (You remember, don't you? The Missile Gap, the Space Race?)

Feeling well rewarded for the time we'd spent in southern New Mexico, we wandered off toward Arizona.