As We See It

Clicking Lake Mead: The national recreation area launched a Virtual Museum

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A 1936 image of Lake Mead’s Boulder City Boat Landing, one of the photographs featured in the national recreation area’s new Virtual Museum.

Lake Mead opened a new museum last week—wanna go? You can’t plug the address into Google Maps, but you can type it into your browser’s address bar: nps.gov/features/lake/museum.

With no brick-and-mortar space to showcase the park’s vast collection of historical items, Lake Mead National Recreation Area went digital and launched a new Virtual Museum. Park archeologists photographed and cataloged 175 artifacts found within its 1.5 million acres, from prehistoric ceramics, tools and bones and a B-29 superfortress oxygen tank to kitchen utensils and glassware from the 1800s.

The online museum also features a Historic Images collection with more than 400 photographs of park scenes, including pictures of buildings in the once-submerged city of St. Thomas and a 1962 shot of a Boulder Beach concession stand (where beers cost 30 cents!).

While photo captions only offer descriptors with no narrative, Lake Mead spokeswoman Christie Vanover says the park is hoping to add an “interpretive message” to the images in the project’s second phase to “explain … how these pieces tell the Lake Mead story.”

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