The broad, flat gravel roadbed gradually ascends to an abrupt end. On a small berm of earth, a few tufts of wildflowers tremble in the wind, life's last purchase on this channel hewn through rock. Beyond is air. Below, 900 feet below, the Colorado River roils away from Hoover Dam.
In just over four years, traffic will heave past this point on Arizona's edge, glide across the gorge and land in a little saddle in the Nevada cliff side, nearly half a mile away. But for now, a wind-tussled silence prevails at what will be the eastern anchorage of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge.
To the right, a trio of towers carrying high-tension lines from the dam crests a small promontory. The cross section of Sugarloaf Mountain glares chalky white on the left, 190 feet shaved away from what otherwise appears to be a mound of russet boulders. High along this sloped embankment, two clumps of scrub have found purchase, tenacious as the wildflowers on the cliff, testimony to nature's determination to reclaim anything artifice imposes.
"We're really proud of our two little bushes," says Barb Quintana, project engineer for this segment of the bypass project, which will divert U.S. 93 from Hoover Dam, crossing the canyon roughly 1,500 feet downstream. She's being lighthearted, but not ironic. Watching a project slowly acquire its presence in the landscape is part of the sense of accomplishment for any job, but this isn't any job. For one thing, the design ethic calls for undisguised intrusion, with no prettifying touches for cuts through hillsides, because that's the way the dam was built. And so the hillside will reclaim what it can of itself.
More important, though, this is the biggest project most of its workers will ever see, an effort not nearly as profound as the construction of the dam, but close enough. And from its inception in 1989 through its conclusion in 2008, the ghosts of the workers who built the dam watch over the shoulders of the bypass builders.
"Everybody understands, in a sense you're making history," says Quintana, who works for the Federal Highway Administration. "You can see it in the workers out there. And you appreciate it's a heck of a lot easier now than it was for those guys," she adds, meaning the dam builders. "After a year, I'm still in awe."
True, these workers operate more powerful machinery, and they return to air-conditioned houses at night. But much of the work is the same. At the cliff's edge, several thick, ribbed spikes driven into the rock were used by workers who rappelled down the cliff to stabilize areas, like the high-scalers of the dam. And much of the work is blasting, drilling, pounding, with the usual growling and grinding of large engines.
"It doesn't change," Quintana observes. "It's what they did 60, 80, 100 years ago."
Because of what they did 70 years ago, backing up the river and tracing a two-lane road along the rim of the dam, we have Las Vegas. Because of NAFTA, we have a major trade route running from Mexico to Canada that must thread through switchbacks and crawl along that dam-top curl, along with the Bickersons from Ohio in their RV. Because of 9/11, we have a potential terrorist disaster. But before NAFTA and 9/11, federal and regional planners could see something would have to be done about U.S. 93.
The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Hoover Dam, created a Colorado River Bridge Management Team in 1989. The Project Management Team includes representatives from the bureau, the Federal Highway Administration, National Park Service, Western Area Power Administration and the transportation departments of Arizona and Nevada. The FHA took the lead in the environmental review process in 1997 as the PMT considered various alignments for the bypass.
The charted, pro-and-con analysis of the alternatives can be found in the project's environmental-impact statement and the official Record of Decision at www.hooverdambypass.org. Along the way, much was heard from Boulder City, with some wanting the town itself bypassed, taking the route through Laughlin, and others dreading the loss of business that would cause.
But the Boulder City Council passed a resolution in 2001 formally requesting a Laughlin alternative. The Sierra Club's Southern Nevada Group vociferously opposed the bypass alternatives close to the dam. Its objections, documented in a supplement to the Record of Decision, include the disruption of a national park and the long-term threat to Boulder City of increased traffic along the so-called "CANAMEX" trucking corridor.
The group's letter in the public comments section argues that "the cultural and environmental impacts are unacceptable, and the long- term community social impacts are destructive. The Sugarloaf Mountain Preferred Alternative selection is biased in favor of the trucking industry choice of the shortest route between two points, regardless of cost."
Not of least concern to the group, and many others, is that the bypass throws a bridge across the canyon within eyesight of Hoover Dam, irrevocably compromising one of the nation's iconic views.
But the time when it might have been possible to prevent that has passed. Whatever you think about the project, it's coming.
"That aesthetic and cultural impact to the Hoover Dam Historic District has been a foundation of the delivery of the whole project," asserts Dave Zanetell, the FHA's project manager. "It's been a driver of almost every decision that we make—how to make sure that we do something that's complementary and yet compatible to the Hoover Dam."
Canyon aesthetics are only a part of Zanetell's purview. In addition to managing construction, he's had to seek and referee the viewpoints of a variety of stake-holders, from Native Americans whose culturally significant lands the project crosses, to hikers concerned with access to park lands (extension of a National Park Service trail is part of the Nevada-side project), to state wildlife officials worried about bighorn sheep. Fences steer sheep away from the roadway, and toward underpasses on both sides of the river.
Zanetell is used to threading highways into environmentally and culturally sensitive areas—for instance, the new entrance to Yosemite National Park, rebuilt after floods in 1997. But for him, too, this is a dream assignment.
"This is why you go to school and become an engineer ... This is a project that matters," he says. "The standard's set for you. When you're building something in the shadow of such an enormous accomplishment, your own reminder of the magnitude and importance of what you're doing, it's there every day to remind you."
Zanetell oversees a design team that comprises HDR Engineering, Sverdrup Civil and T.Y. Lin International. The trio collaboratively designed the Colorado River Bridge, says Zanetell. First, a number of bridge types—arch, truss, cable-stay, etc.—were considered, with the arch selected. Then, six alternatives in concrete and steel were considered, and a concrete-steel composite structure triumphed. A design advisory panel helped steer the process.
"Obviously, it's not possible to avoid all of the effects that might result," says Bob Frankeberger, architect with Arizona's State Historic Preservation Office, and a design panel member. "If you can't avoid it, you try to minimize and reduce the effect."
This thinking produced an aesthetic that tried to complement the dam without distracting from it. Admittedly, this is a challenge, given its proximity and the fact that the bridge's deck will be 276 feet above the level of the dam. So the bridge is about as unremarkable as it can be. "The bridge does defer to the dam, I think, and the dam remains the center of the attention," observes Frankeberger.
The beauty of the dam, he says, is that "it expresses its job," and so will the bridge. One of the rejected alternatives, a Vierendeel-rib arch, would have been a more powerful statement, with deck supports radiating from two concentric arches, but it would have called too much attention to itself. The dam, says Zanetell, "wasn't put out here to be something other than its root function. You don't need to do that with this bridge."
Still, the dam was adorned with art deco detailing. And it could be argued that a higher-level bridge a mere 1,500 feet away is inevitably distracting, so why not make it as spirited as possible? Frankeberger acknowledges "some championing" of this view, but in the end the minimalist approach seemed more in keeping with the dam's ideal. "The aesthetic is really based on an expression of engineering excellence," Frankeberger says.
The bridge will be detailed, however, for pedestrians. Because the deck is so high, the dam will not be visible from cars on the bridge, but it will be possible to park and stroll across the near edge to view the dam. A lot of thought has gone into the railing that viewers will encounter, says Zanetell.
But the bridge remains an imaginary goal for two teams of contractors building its approaches. R.E. Monks Construction and Vastco Inc. are about 85 percent finished with the $21.5 million, nearly two-mile project on the Arizona side. Edward Kraemer and Sons started work on the Nevada side last fall, and that 2.2-mile, $30.1 million project is about 30 percent complete, says Zanetell.
Driving along U.S. 93, you can spot work under way, clearing cuts and filling low areas, starting at a point just past the Hacienda Casino. The new four-lane will cross over the future "Hoover Dam Access Road" at two points before rising into the hills to that saddle at the Nevada cliff side.
On the other side, the construction team had to realign the soon-to-be-former U.S. 93 into "Interim 93" in order to build its replacement. Quintana says the crew aims for "a balanced job," trying as much as possible to use rock and dirt cleared by excavation to build embankments along other stretches of the roadbed. This involves clearing and moving 1.8 million cubic yards of "material." The cut at Sugarloaf mountain alone accounted for 750,000 cubic yards.
Near the future junction with the current highway, massive yellow dump trucks hum and bound along with an ease and swiftness that belies their size and burden. In relays, they pick up loads of rock from a backhoe-loader. Next to it, a backhoe fitted with a hydraulic hammer pounds boulders into rocks in preparation.
Nearby, a pair of cranes at either edge of a short bridge over an arroyo tag-teams 130-foot-long, cast-concrete, I-beam girders into place. Farther up the roadbed, the beams are in place and crews are building the deck of a longer arroyo bridge. Quintana steers a Tahoe up a hill, stops and rolls down the window to speak with a worker at a backhoe pounding rocks along the embankment. The impromptu path leads to the point where the graded roadbed resumes its journey, from this bridge to the one that will span the river.
Here workers prepare the roadbed for the concrete, which gets poured at night, the better to control temperature and evaporation, says Quintana. They work in front of a long yellow armature that stretches across the bridge deck. This grades and screeds the new concrete, made on-site by Casino Ready Mix. The thrum and bleat of machinery blankets the hazy, terra-cotta landscape from this point to the future highway interchange, where Casino set up its silo.
But the clangor thins and fades along the rising roadbed as it nears the cliff and its future union with the river bridge. The composite material, on which the road surface will be laid in another segment of the project, has been graded to within an inch or so of level. Here and there, pink ribbons attest to this; they are on the ends of stakes pounded into the ground, used to guide the leveling of the roadbed.
At the roadbed's end, where the wildflowers clutch the berm, Quintana seems less concerned with the dramatic view the river bridge will span than with the work leading to it, the pink ribbons in the composite, the shaved side of Sugarloaf Mountain.
No doubt her dam-building forebears took such assessments as they tamed their approaches to the canyon walls. Their efforts echo here.
"It's a great cut," says Quintana.