Death Valley

Ramin and I got back from our Death Valley trip a few weeks ago. We went there in early March and it was a BLAST!  Who knew Death Valley could be so fun! I have a TON of pictures to post about Death Valley so instead of posting them all at once, I'm going to post them by days....sort of like how I posted our honeymoon pictures.

Here are the pictures from the day we drove down to Death Valley. We left at 8am Salt Lake time and we drove through Vegas and stopped at the Hoover Dam.  We didn't arrive to our hotel in Death Valley Junction until about 8pm.

Like I said, we stopped at the Hoover Dam and took a tour of the inside. We did the dual tour of not only the power plant but also further down within the damn.

Here is one of the four main power plant rooms. Each power plant room has 8-9 of these turbine things. They were HUGE. So amazing and electricity can be generated by water. These are also the original turbines made back in the 1930s.

During our "inside"  damn tour, we had to walk across this grating with a nice drop below it. There were a few people on the tour who were a bit afraid of stepping on the grating. Clearly, Ramin and I were not afraid - those are our feet below.

A few steps away from the grating was this porthold thing. We are literally right in the middle of the damn wall at this point. Pretty cool!

This picture gives you perspective of where we actually were. Just look at the middle of this wall somewhere and that's where we were.

Obviously we were really deep within the dam where we stood. Here is a picture of one of the staircases that lets you walk up or down the wall of the damn. This was our view looking up...it seemed like the stairs went on forever. And these are the original stairs from when the dam was built in the 1930s.

This was our downward view. This section of the stairs was made OSHA complaint and you can clearly see they look safer - although they still go on forever!

This is just one of two very large copper statues that greet you at the Hoover Dam. They've obviously turned green now, just like the Statue of Liberty. They were very art-deco. It's hard to tell their perspective but they were HUGE.

We took our obligatory shot of the national sign just as the sun was setting after our tour. We didn't get any pictures of the new bridge that was constructed over the dam although we did go and walk on it - very cool!

We finally arrived at our hotel, the Amargosa Opera House & Hotel, in Death Valley Junction. It was the fanciest place on Earth but it was one of the ONLY available places to stay and it had some history. It was kind of creepy to me and it was dingy, but it was kind of fun staying there.

Here's the shot of our room. We had two beds because it was the only room available. We only used one.

The bathroom. It all looked like original styling from the 1920s and it was very very old....at least we had running water, even if the pressure was extremely low :P

Probably one of the most unique features of the hotel was that there were murals and paintings everywhere. The owner of the place who acquired it in the 1960s painted everything in the 70s. This was right outside our room. What's up with the picture that wasn't finished?

This was the other side of the hallway.