Hungry Horse Dam

In the hard winter of 1900-01, two freight horses named Tex and Jerry strayed into the South Fork country and were found a month later, belly-deep in snow and nothing but skin and bones. Their teamsters cleared a trail and fed them until they could walk out. The mountain and the creek took the name Hungry Horse, and so, half a century later, did the dam.

Congress authorized it in 1944, to catch the South Fork of the Flathead's spring floods and make power for the Northwest. Crews poured the first concrete in September 1949, worked through the nights under floodlights strung across the narrow canyon, and shut down every winter. President Truman dedicated it on October 1, 1952, and it was finished on July 18, 1953: 564 feet high and around three million cubic yards of concrete, at the time the third-largest dam in the world and the second-highest concrete one. It was the first dam built with fly ash in the mix and an early large-scale use of air-entrained concrete, methods that soon became standard.

A road has crossed the crest since November 1953. The spillway is a morning glory, a round concrete mouth set into the reservoir that drops water as much as 490 feet down a shaft, the highest of its kind anywhere. Behind the dam the reservoir runs back into the Flathead National Forest, with gravel roads and campgrounds along both shores.