Up stream from the Hoover Dam 2025

The Hoover Dam is as impressive an engineering feat as it and its support systems are an ugly stain on the natural surroundings. It is 726 feet tall (nearly 2.5 football fields) and built from enough concrete to pave a two lane road from San Francisco to New York. Four diversion tunnels 56 feet in diameter with a total length of over 3 miles were bored in order to drain the valley that the dam was built in. The concrete aggregate, its transport, its curing, the diversion tunnels, the power generation, and every other physical aspect of this feature, captured and generated incredible engineering feats. The labor practices and the ecological damage that it caused were equally incredible in their abhorrence. Take into account the myth that stock grazing created gullying and siltation and the subsequent actions that he US government took against the Navajo people and ruined their economy which forced them into relying on the government to survive and this engineering feat no longer looks that incredible. Nearby Boulder City which was built to house the workers that built the dam has a great breakfast joint called the Coffee Cup worth checking out.

Best Buds

This is one of my favorite photos of all time for more reasons than just a cool image. I had started a photography program at Oakland Community College a year before and met my two best friends in the world there but I didn’t know it then. Rob is the head of the photography department. Rich and I were students. We now call ourselves the Unholy Trinity. Back then Rob was the cool professor and Rich was a kid in a Bad Brains t-shirt that I chatted with over some prints in the lab. Despite the 10 year age difference between each of us we all bonded over music, passing mixed CDs to each other and eventually getting together for some acoustic sessions and performances. The last time we played together was for Rich’s 40th, just before Covid hit. Really missing those jam sessions. This photo was made in 2002 at Snow Jam in Detroit. Rich had just started playing in the Suicide Machines earlier that year. This shot has that movie-still feeling to it. I was shooting film at the time (didn’t switch over until 2008) and my color choice was usually push processing Fuji 800NPZ which had a killer feel to it.