Hoover Dam Arizona side
— the wall the river agreed to stand still against.
Not only on a wall.
Hoover Dam Arizona side, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Arizona-side approach to Hoover Dam, where U.S. 93 drops out of the Black Mountains and the canyon opens onto the dam crest. A 726-foot concrete arch-gravity wall holding back Lake Mead, completed in 1936 and standing on the Arizona–Nevada line. The Arizona abutment carries the visitor parking structure, the original Winged Figures of the Republic on the dam crest, and the long view downriver to the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, the 2010 span that lifted U.S. 93 traffic 900 feet above the river.
The place, in three passes.
Hoover Dam spans Black Canyon on the Colorado River at the Arizona–Nevada state line, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. It is a concrete arch-gravity dam, 726 feet tall and 1,244 feet long across the crest, completed in 1936 and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Lake Mead, the reservoir it holds, is the largest by volume in the United States when full. The Arizona side of the dam sits in Mohave County within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and holds the main visitor parking garage and the eastern abutment overlook.
The dam holds about 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete poured between 1933 and 1935 in interlocking blocks cooled by an embedded grid of one-inch steel pipe carrying refrigerated water; without that system the curing concrete would still be cooling today. On the dam crest, Oskar J. W. Hansen’s 30-foot bronze Winged Figures of the Republic stand on the Nevada side, while the Arizona side carries the original Art Deco intake towers and the upstream face. The dam was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985.
The Arizona-side parking garage is the primary visitor parking and was the through-route for U.S. 93 until the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge opened on October 19, 2010, lifting through-traffic about 900 feet above the river. The Bureau of Reclamation runs the dam tour and the powerplant tour daily; tickets are sold on site and at recreation.gov. Walking the dam crest is free. Summer afternoons on the Black Canyon walls regularly run above 110 degrees Fahrenheit; early morning is the comfortable window.
