U.S. Route 93 in Nevada portion of abandoned railroad right-of-way. A shopping center now sits where the original truck bypass alignment once ran. US 93 was realigned again on October 19, 2010, when the Mike O'Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Black Canyon of the Colorado River opened to vehicular traffic. With that, the highway no longer passes over Hoover Dam, and the state-maintained portion of the replaced route was renamed as Hoover Dam Access Road (SR 172). In 2011, US 93 from Buchanan Boulevard to the Nevada terminus of the Hoover Dam Bypass was expanded to four through lanes with dedicated turn
Geology of the Grand Canyon area deposits. At the same time, streams flowed from highlands in central Arizona north and across what is today the western Grand Canyon, possibly feeding a larger river. The mechanism by which the ancestral Lower Colorado River captured this drainage and the drainage from much of the rest of the Colorado Plateau is not known. Possible explanations include headward erosion or a broken natural dam of a lake or river. Whatever the cause, the Lower Colorado probably captured the landlocked Upper Colorado somewhere west of the Kaibab Uplift. The much larger drainage area and yet steeper stream gradient helped to further