I’m so grateful to be sharing these photos with you! I thought I would never recover them!

Somehow I lost all my photos from our trip to Vegas. They were there, and then they were ALL gone! Not in any folder, not in the trash!

Luckily, my husband is a genius, and he set up an auto backup to our external hard drive. So basically, anytime I import photos, the photos are automatically stored on an external hard drive, JUST IN CASE my computer has a brain fart. I’ve never had to use it before, but I’m so glad I had it set up!

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Our first day in Las Vegas, we drove to Boulder City to see the Hoover Dam, which is on the border of Nevada and Arizona. We had an awesome tri-tip steak sandwich for breakfast at Chilly Jilly’s. (Rated #1 on TripAdvisor.)

Hoover Dam photos

Hoover Dam was the greatest dam constructed in its day. Rising 726 feet above bedrock, Hoover is still the Western Hemisphere’s highest concrete dam.

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This was our first view of Lake Mead as we were driving towards Hoover Dam. The water is so low that entire marinas have dried up. It’s down more than 130 feet since a high-water mark was last reached in 2000, which could ultimately affect the more than 40 million people that rely on Lake Mead for water.

Hoover Dam

This trip to see the Hoover Dam was a first for both my husband and me. Nearly one million people tour the dam each year.

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Visitors rub the feet of the “Winged Figures of the Republic,” or bronze angel sculptures for good luck. Yes, of course I rubbed them, too.

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This is the view of the Colorado River looking down from the top of the dam. The bypass bridge in the background is the only way to get across the dam now since US 93 on the Arizona side is closed.

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I was really surprised at how low the concrete wall looking over the dam is. No bars or guards of any kind. You can lean way over!

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Lead Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and can hold 9.3 trillion gallons of water. It is currently at a record low. The white “bathtub ring” on the rocks around Lake Mead shows where the shoreline used to be.

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This is one of the four intake towers that control water flow. Each tower is 395 feet high and each controls one-fourth the supply of water for the powerplant turbines.

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All of these photos were taken with my Canon 6D. See what’s in my camera bag.