I never got around to doing a second entry yesterday... so today I give you two photos in one go. These are both from our trip around the US, specifically our bus tour of the American South-West. We stayed overnight at Lake Powell and we drove up to the dam for an optional guided tour of the dam workings. The timing of our tour was bad - thanks to anti-terrorist paranoia we weren't permitted to take ANYTHING into the building with us, even our wallets or our jacket (or a camera), plus it was late in the afternoon of a very long day's travelling, so only a couple of people thought it was worth the hassle of going in. When I was a little girl, my parents took us to see a real hydro-electric dam and I remember that it was incredibly noisy, unbelievably HUGE, and I would have loved to see one again as an adult - but not if I couldn't even take photographs!
Next morning we went on a boat tour on the lake and it was fascinating... And on the way out of the area we drove past the dam from the other side and I snapped a photo through the bus window (hence the blur and the black line across the middle of the picture.)
The scariest thing about Lake Powell is how little lake there actually was. All that white stone has been bleached by decades submerged in water, and those huge chunky dam abutments were intended to be well below the surface of the water. But for the last fifteen years the lake level has been steadily dropping until everything's out in the open air. As far as I know, the lake level has continued to drop steadily in the years since our visit... if it continues at this rate, one of these days there won't BE a lake there to see.