Day in the Desert

I love bridges-when I lived in NYC I made many photos of all the bridges--the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Williamsburg, the Triboro, the Whitestone, the Verrazano, the TappanZee SO Many bridges when you live on an ISLAND!! Check out this great bridge and dam we saw on our camping/sightseeing weekend when I visited my friend in Mesa, AZ. We drove thru the Superstition Wilderness area via the Apache Trails Scenic Byway, and made a loop using hwy 60. The Roosevelt Dam and Bridge was a beautiful photo opt stop along the way...

The dam holds back the Salt River....it was completed in 1911 is 357 ft high and cost $10 million to build! Originally it was 70 ft shorter but was made higher in 1989 it was also re-concreted and this caused the dam to loose its National Historic Landmark status.-Bummer- but if you look at this OLD PHOTO of the dam you can see it was quite a change-

This is the back side of the dam....you can see its a HUGE amount of water being held back, I would say that is only 15 ft from the top!!!

The Bridge that spans the water beyond the dam is an awesome piece of engineering! Its a beautiful sight!

Roosevelt Bridge 

...thats Hwy 88 /188 going over that-a-way but we went the other way.... this is the bridge looking back over our shoulders...

We had our lunch alongside the water the view was awesome!

...we continued on and just a hop n skip from the bridge is the Tonto National Monument and there are some great ruins of Cliff Dwellings right behind the visitors center there. These were built by the Salado people...and these are approx 700 yrs old....It was close to 100 degrees this day so we took a few photos and kept moving...

This is on the edge of the Sonoran Desert so mannnnyyyyy desert plants everywhere....I fell in love with the desert all over again in this region!!

                    

                                 

More to come