See? There Is Some Small Utility To Twitter

Several years ago I made a visit to Vegas with the in-laws, and during that visit I made a side trip to the Hoover Dam. Well, I'd love to say that I was the bloke who discovered the dam (as a natural formation just sitting there in the wilderness), but barring that I'm content to state that it's an astounding thing, the simple fact of it.

The roadway leading to the site is narrow and twisting, and you come upon the gorge suddenly, twisting and descending down to dam-top level where you proceed to drive across the curved rim of the dam. It's great for sightseeing, but it's an impediment to the flow of traffic if you're just passing through and (as I understand it) it takes quite a detour to bypass it. Now they are in process of building a bypass to the original roadway, which requires bridging the gorge. The footings of this bridge were in place, as I recall, during our visit in early 2007, and now it turns out the photographer Jamey Stillings has been documenting what is ending up being yet another amazing civil works project at the site (though certainly not one of the scale of the original). This is another of those things (like the dam itself, maybe) which seems at first mundane--a concrete arch bridge--but which on closer inspection turns out to be exceedingly difficult to realize. This is surely part of the pull of the photographs. The photographs are stunning, both in showing the kind of machinery-geek details that I love, and also for capturing the stark natural beauty of the place (I'd post one as a teaser, but there's the whole copyright business and so on. So you'll just have to trust me and go see for yourself).

I learned of this site from a Twitter feed. My brain cells have proven themselves too old to grasp the point of Facebook, and I was beginning to wonder if Twitter was similarly a youth-oriented phenomenon. And then this happens, convincing me that I'm just not reading the right tweets.