Gents:

I just wrote a book of photo captions about Las Vegas, and one of them was about the construction of the Palazzo hotel and casino.

They first dug down 60 feet for most of the eight acre lot. That process began by removing 1.2 million cubic yards of dirt to build a 60-foot-deep, 4,000 space subterranean parking garage: as many as 600 trucks a day, six days a week, for a total of 114,285 truck trips.

There are a million cubic yards of silt behind Rindge Dam, so what it would take to remove that would be 100,000 truckloads of dirt weighing who knows how much.

That alone would probably turn Malibu Canyon Road to rubble, so that is one reason the dam will probably never be removed.

If I ever do the steelhead return to Malibu Creek story, there’s one piece of the puzzle.

It’s not hard to imagine Malibu Creek back in the early 1900s being just as good as any one of those magic steelhead rivers up north.

The lagoon would probably have been loaded with them, waiting for the once a month rainstorm and then sprinting up the river to spawn.

They couldn’t have gone more than 10 miles, which is a cakewalk to a steelhead.

In it’s pristine form, I’ll bet it was a classic.