Dam Flying Things

Parker Dam, which backs up the Colorado River, is just a short ways upriver from the RV park where we are staying. It is a fascinating structure and I borrowed this image and some verbiage from the Internet to help you understand the dam, I can't fly well enough to take this first picture.

What you see is not what you get at Parker Dam, known as “the deepest dam in the world.” Engineers, digging for bedrock on which to build, had to excavate so far beneath the bed of the Colorado River that 73 percent of Parker Dam’s 320-foot structural height is not visible. Its reservoir, Lake Havasu, is a different matter. Its deep blue water stretches for 45 miles behind the dam, creating an oasis in the Arizona desert.

This is looking at the dam from the road on the Arizona side. It is not a long dam and would be dwarfed in length by most of the Snake River dams. Lake Havasu, behind the dam, is used for water for both California and Arizona and there are aqueducts that go out form the south end of the lake on both sides.

This is the outflow of the dam, the power generating station as it were. In Hover and many other dams along the Colorado the outflow is from the bottom of the upstream reservoir in this case the input from Lake Havasu is from the surface of the lake just to the right of this image. The temperature of the water below the dam is a bit warmer for water sports.

You can drive across the dam.No trailers allowed and no large vehicles. This is the barrier set up to restrict the width of the vehicle. If you are wider than these barriers you will either turn around before going through or be trimmed down by the impact. Oh, you cannot drive across the dam from 11:00 at night until 5:00 in the morning. It is closed during those hours as are many dams.

This image gives you the reason for the width restriction. Yes this is two lanes but they are not wide and as you can see the dam thing curves. It is not a real comfortable feeling to have another vehicle pass you on the dam even a smaller than you vehicle. Neat place nonetheless.

When we were out looking for birds this plane flew by. There were actually two of them. My motto is, take a picture of anything that flies if it looks interesting and this sure looked interesting to us. It seems to be a WWII P-51 but I could be wrong. Perhaps someone knows this birds identity and can comment. The two planes were separated and I could not get them both in the same image.

Here is another image of a Clark's Grebe. We took this on another trip to Bill Williams. The apparently younger and smaller one on the right kept pestering the adult bird and wanted to be fed. The adult bird would dive,come back up, and give the juvenile something to eat but there was no satisfaction just more pestering.

Here it looks as if the two of them have come to an agreement. There is no begging at least not what we can detect. Neat image.

The Osprey is often called the Fish Hawk for good reason. The following description of Osprey and their ability to catch fish was taken from "Allabout Birds" on the Internet.

Ospreys are excellent anglers. Over several studies, Ospreys caught fish on at least 1 in every 4 dives, with success rates sometimes as high as 70 percent. The average time they spent hunting before making a catch was about 12 minutes—something to think about next time you throw your line in the water.

I know I showed Goldeneye in a previous post. This more recent image was a decent closeup that gives you a better idea of the identifying marks and colors on the bird. There was a flock of about 73 Goldeneye off in the distance and some of them, as this fellow, were wandering around looking for food and he was a lot closer.