Question of the Day - 22 July 2024

We did a Google Image search and came up completely empty. That was unexpected; surely, a photo exists somewhere similar to the one you took from Boulder Beach. But no. We got bridges in China, trestles in Russia, flood damage in Bangladesh, and a bombed span in Vietnam. 

However, from the looks of it and what we know of the history of Boulder Beach, this is probably the remains of some infrastructure that made up the aggregate operation for Six Companies, the conglomerate that built Hoover Dam. 

A literally unimaginable quantity of rock was required to create the cement for the dam and part of the aggregate-sorting operation took place on Big Boulder Island across from Boulder Beach. 

According to a story from early last year on 8NewsNow, the heavily silted water from the Colorado River was pumped into a massive clarifying tank on the island, 110 feet in diameter and 15 feet deep. When the silt settled at the bottom of the tank, the now-clean water was piped down 130 feet to a screening area where it washed the gravel that was crushed into cement. 

A railroad spur line was also laid all the way to the tank to help move the aggregate and a portion of it, we strongly suspect, is what the lowering lake level has exposed on Big Boulder Island and appears in the photo. This is all speculation, so if anyone has a better idea, we'd love to hear it.

By the way, Big Boulder "Island" wasn't always an island. No one seems to know how deep the water is that separates the island from the beach, but if the water keeps dropping, a land "bridge" might be exposed that connects the two. That's the way it was for the millennia before Hoover Dam was completed, Lake Mead started to fill up, and these features were flooded.