Hoover Dam will be seventy years old next year. This means that if it were on the Strip, it would have been blown down at least a decade ago. But if age isn’t beauty on Las Vegas Boulevard, it is in the Black Canyon of the Colorado. Hoover Dam may not be the newest, biggest, or most expensive of its kind, but a million visitors a year don’t seem to care if it doesn’t merit any of those superlatives. That’s because it rates another title. “America’s Dam,” a welcome sign proclaims. George Washington may be the father, but the mother of our country is a honking huge slab of concrete.

If Hoover Dam is the coolest man-made river-tamer in the USA, it’s also the hottest, at least during the summer. Tourists apparently don’t mind getting seared as they peer down the mammoth concrete face, but since I have a choice, I waited until Labor Day had passed to trek down through Henderson and Boulder City. Even so, it was over a hundred on Tuesday, and conditions were still decidedly griddle-like on the tarmac. It was well worth $5 to park in the shade afforded by the parking garage.

The parking garage, which was part of a recent building project that included the new visitors’ center, is a wonder in its own right. Constructed of rust-colored concrete in the same art deco style as the dam, it looks a little like an Egyptian temple nestled into the gorge on the Nevada side. Elevators, stairs, walkways, and escalators connect it to the cylindrical visitors’ center on the other side of the highway. Admission to the visitors’ center — $10 for adults, discounts for kids and seniors — includes entrance to various interactive exhibits, a visit to the generators inside the dam, and lots of information from well-informed guides armed with every dam joke that’s ever existed. (All of this is a change from pre-9/11 days, when tours were more extensive, and dam junkies could even take an extra-long “hard hat” tour.)

These days, the “tour” consists of a long downward trip in an elevator packed shoulder-to-shoulder with forty other people. A trip through a tunnel ends at a balcony overlooking the dam’s generators. The elevator is then supposed to take you to the “Exhibits level” of the new visitors’ center. I say “supposed to” because, after all forty of us had squeezed back inside, the elevator’s doors refused to close. Our guide, a jolly optimist, kept flipping switches, pushing buttons, and “swiping” his electronic key card, but nothing happened. Then the phone rang with the news that the forty people in the elevator next to ours were also stuck, but their plight made me feel downright lucky. That elevator stopped working after the doors closed, and they were stuck like canned sardines for nearly half an hour.

The malfunctioning elevator actually made for a better tour, because we ended up walking the length of the dam through a long tiled tunnel that is usually off limits to visitors. We rode back up to the top of the dam in another elevator, emerging on the Arizona side at a good spot to peer over the wall down the dam’s face.

Hoover Dam is one of those structures that can only be described with hyperbolic adjectives and many-zeroed numbers. It’s hard to believe, as you walk across it, that the top edge is still a state highway and the main route from Las Vegas to Kingman and Interstate 40. Even though most commercial trucks have been detoured through Laughlin since 9/11, traffic still crawls through the hordes of pedestrians. This will change when the next great building project is complete, a new bridge and highway just south of the dam. (Click here for a current photo of the bridge crossing — it’s quite an impressive project!)

You can easily ignore Hoover Dam if you live in Las Vegas, thinking about it only when you’re desperate for a way to get rid of your houseguests for a day. But next time, think about going with them. You’ll be amazed at how the Grande Dame of grand dams is holding up, and with luck, your elevator might malfunction at the best possible moment.

Click here for my story about the 48th Annual 31ers Reunion, a yearly gathering of the people who built the dam and their families.