Enjoy Every Sandwich

Hungry Horse Dam

Aug 4th, 2008 by Kirsten

I meant for this to be a nice Monday morning photo essay sort of thing, but it was a very busy weekend.

Last week, I had the great pleasure of visiting my favorite man up near Kalispell. The drive was a little painful- four hours each way, lots of construction and a couple of campers that refused to pull over causing me to drive 15-20 miles per hour under the speed limit for long distances. But I did get to see many little towns and attractions that I’d like to revisit later, the scenery was beautiful particularly near Flathead Lake, and I saw all manner of coffee drive-throughs and fresh-picked cherry stands that I’ll need to get back to this summer.

We drove out to tour Hungry Horse Dam- a dam on the South Fork of the Flathead River in northwestern Montana and the eleventh largest dam in the United States.

Here is most of it. You can see the powerplant at the bottom. Upstream from the dam is a very large reservoir largely used for recreational purposes.

Here’s a view from the top of the 564-foot dam looking down on the powerplant.

Here’s a better view of the powerplant. It provides a billion kilowatt-hours of power each year, but that’s only a fraction of the power production the dam contributes to. Water is stored in the upstream reservoir during flood season and released later to help power downstream powerplants for a total of 4.6 billion kilowatt-hours annually.

Of course, you don’t want the reservoir upstream to get too full. Here is the glory hole- basically a big drain which dumps excess water that spills over the top of the hole down to the river below.