A Day at the Ranch (Not) - Tour of Hungry Horse Dam

[malachi31369]

Many workers died building this by falling into the concrete and where never rescued. So there is dead bodies in this project.

[Katsnake11]

My grandfather helped build this dam after WWII. :-)

[PandDatMTRanch]

@Katsnake11 : That certainly must have been a huge project!

[Katsnake11]

@PandDatMTRanch Yes, several years, several men's lives. He worked on it for most of the 5 years it took to build it after he got home from WWII, (He'd helped work on the Grand Coulee Dam before WWII as well.) After Hungry Horse Dam, he went to work at the Aluminum plant outside Columbia Falls. Our family has strong ties to that little town. His parents and my Grandma's parents all homesteaded and lived there.

[awbcrazy]

@Katsnake11 That's cool! One of my Dad's relatives was also involved. Did you know some men were buried in there? If you feel into the wall while it was being poured....you were never getting out. I lived in Montana for several years and we went across that damn so many times I can't count. The tours are pretty interesting too.

[Katsnake11]

@awbcrazy Yes, Grandpa told me about it one time when we were going there to check it out, just as something to do on a warm summer day. There are about 26-30 creeks that all feed in to the reservoir from right nearby and because they were all lacking in originality, when it came time to name them, they used military alpha code, so there's Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, all the way through to Zulu. Once they hit Zulu, they used their wives names.