Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Vast reservoir behind a Depression-era dam, its bleached shoreline ring exposed by decades of drought.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Las Vegas starts with a rusted barrel a boater spotted at Hemenway Harbor in May 2022, holding a man shot execution-style decades earlier, and works back through how Hoover Dam created this reservoir in the 1930s and swallowed whatever went into it since. You'll hear about the wave of gangland killings that hit Las Vegas in the mid-to-late 1970s, and about a Chicago-born casino host who ran boats on this lake before he vanished one August day in 1976. Look for the pale band of bleached rock along the shoreline, left behind as the water has dropped more than a hundred seventy feet.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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