Hungry Horse Dam Visit Day 20

- July 28, 2025

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Hey friends and family,

Well, our tour guide, Julie McCoy (aka Sarah Jones) is off duty and is no longer working! She went back to her day job and is probably making more money and getting less harassment from the troops. She did a great job organizing and touring the gang around. We all highly suggest you book Julie to plan your vacation! She even chauffeured us around and lent us her car when we needed it. What a committed soul to the good of all!

Just in case you don't know who Julie McCoy is - see below from the 1970s TV show! You should see if you can find an episode of the iconic blast from the past show. You old timers - do you remember this show?

The group is dwindling down - Pat and Andrea left this morning bright and early. So just Dave and I left at Sarah and Tim's house. For the first morning in a while, we had a leisurely morning. We got up late and then walked around town and had a nice snack at Amazing Crepes - the Monte Cristo, a crepe filled with ham, turkey, cheese and raspberry sauce - it was delicious. We mailed some post cards to the grandkids and then decided to go for a tour of Hungry Horse Dam, a 1/2 mile wide dam made with 3 million cubic yards of concrete built in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, due to being short staffed, there are no more tours of the dam. So we read around the museum and walked across the dam to view the area. It was very interesting to see this huge structure. Then we took a ride partway around the reservoir, which is huge. We didn't feel like driving 120 miles around! We stopped and saw a deer munching on some berries and I was convinced they were the ever popular huckleberries so we picked some to share with Sarah and Tim. To our dismay, they weren't huckleberries but service berries, which are apparently eatable as well. Just in case, we did not sample the berries as we picked!

We enjoyed walking around the Whitefish Farmer's market and a dinner at Fleur, the local bakery that was making sourdough pizza - Tim was lobbying for tacos at the Knights of Columbus, but . . . Sarah won out on the discussion and we had pizza. Tim has to learn Dave's motto of "Anything for you honey!" or "Yes, that's great honey!" Only 2 years of marriage - it might take a few more years for that wisdom to come around! All good on a hot evening in Whitefish.

Another fun-filled day in the Whitefish area!

Carol and Dave

Some fun facts about the dam:

In 1953, Hungry Horse Dam was completed on the South Fork of the Flathead River, in a scenic spot surrounded by more than 25 mountain peaks. The dam took five years to build as construction shut down every winter, and crews labored to clear thousands of trees from the site, a job accomplished by chaining a huge, 4½-ton steel ball to a couple of tractors and pulling it through dead timber and over stumps left by loggers. One contractor built an iron drag shaped like an umbrella to gather the timber into a pile for burning. When Hungry Horse Reservoir inundated a fire lookout tower, the Bureau of Reclamation rebuilt it elsewhere, along with U.S. Forest Service roads, bridges, and buildings.

At 564 feet high, Hungry Horse is one of the largest concrete arch dams in the United States, and its morning-glory spillway, with water cascading over the rim and dropping 490 feet, is the highest in the world. Hungry Horse was built not for irrigation, as were so many other Reclamation dams, but to provide water storage that could be used to increase hydroelectric power production at Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams, downstream on the Columbia River. Hungry Horse, its reservoir, and the four generators in its powerplant (which produce about one billion kilowatt hours of power a year) also provide flood control and electricity to the surrounding area, including the towns of Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls.