US-93: The Hoover Dam Crossing
The desert run from Kingman to Las Vegas — over the one place where Arizona and Nevada physically meet: Hoover Dam, wedged into Black Canyon, and the reservoir and neon it made possible.
The Route at a Glance
Route 66 gets the songs, but the road that made the modern Southwest possible runs north out of Kingman — where the Mother Road crosses US-93, the highway that ties Phoenix to Las Vegas. For just over a hundred miles it runs northwest across the high desert and drops toward the Colorado River, delivering you to the one place where Arizona and Nevada physically touch: Hoover Dam, wedged into Black Canyon where the river runs narrowest.
The dam is the reason for everything downstream. Between 1931 and 1936, some twenty-one thousand workers poured a concrete arch-gravity wall seven hundred twenty-six feet high — the tallest dam on earth when Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it in the fall of 1935 — and backed the Colorado up into Lake Mead, still the largest reservoir in the country. Somewhere between ninety-six and a hundred and twelve men died building it. The water and power it pushed out across the desert are what made Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas grow into the cities they are; without the dam, none of them would be the same size.
For seventy-four years US-93 crept across the dam's crest itself — one lane each way, threading hairpin turns and a crowd of dam tourists. Since 2010 it soars instead over the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, arcing some nine hundred feet above the river just downstream. It's a fitting span for a road between two states: it's named jointly for Mike O'Callaghan, a governor of Nevada, and Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who left football to enlist as an Army Ranger and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. Park at the dam and walk the bridge's pedestrian deck — the view straight down Black Canyon is the whole reason to stop.
Past the crossing the highway skirts Boulder City, the town the government built from nothing in 1931 to house the dam's workers and kept deliberately dry — no gambling, no liquor, and a firing offense to be caught chasing either one down the road in Las Vegas.
Which is, of course, where you're headed. Las Vegas — Spanish for "the meadows" — carried its name for a century before it had a single card table. Artesian springs once broke through the desert floor here into grass and mesquite, a rare Mojave oasis that the Southern Paiute, the Nuwuvi, wintered around for generations before a Spanish trading party on the Old Spanish Trail set the name down in 1829. Mormon settlers raised an adobe fort by the main spring in 1855; its remnant still stands at the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort. The springs themselves were pumped dry in the twentieth century — the water that replaced them is drawn from the same river you crossed at the dam. And when the first neon flickered on over Fremont Street, it burned on the dam's cheap current. The whole city, in the end, is Hoover Dam's argument — made in light.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
7 stops along the route, in driving order from Kingman, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let US-93: The Hoover Dam Crossing do what it does best.
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