In 1857 Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives commanded an expedition to explore the Colorado River. After wrecking their 54-foot paddlewheel steamboat, Explorer, on a a rock in Black Canyon (where Hoover Dam is today), Ives and his men set out overland. While camped in the mountains east of the Colorado, Ives allegedly noticed the “regularity of the strata” on a nearby ridge that gave a “distinct appearance of a huge sheet of music.” So he named the range The Music Mountains. In 1936, with the open
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