Dam, Another One

Truck maintenance was on our minds yesterday; we needed to have the oil changed and to wash Black Beauty to see how deep the scratches were to her finish.  The oil was changed successfully in Columbia Falls and we washed away the mud and some of the marks but it's obvious we're going to have to work on the finish of the truck sometime soon.

As we were driving home we noticed the sign for the Hungry Horse Dam and since we're always good for some dam information (!) we decided to head up that way. There is a tiny visitor center with information on the dam and the local area inside, with a friendly young man and woman available to answer questions.  The name Hungry Horse, which was given to the town, the dam, a mountain, a lake and a creek, comes from two work horses which got lost during the winter in the early 1900s.  Found weak and starving about a month later, they were eventually nursed back to health and so the name stuck.

Located about 4 miles off the main roadway, the Hungry Horse Dam was built for flood control and completed in 1953.  Standing 564 feet tall it has the highest morning glory spillway in the world. What is a morning glory spillway?  While I can't show it to you in action, in theory it works like this; when the waters of the Hungry Horse reservoir rise to a certain level, they spill over the morning glory opening down into a series of pipes.  The action of the swirling water creates a morning glory effect, but basically it works like the action of water going down your kitchen sink drain, swirling in a vortex down below the dam structure.

 The morning glory picture above is courtesy of maps.pomocnik.com, it is not mine.

This area too was burned in the forest fires of 2003.  Below is the Flathead River coming out of the dam.

And because sometimes I'm five years old.