Travel: Fort Peck

Peck's Tyranasaurus...

...is but one of many highlights at the new Fort Peck Interpretive Center situated at the base of the dam beside the giant twin towers that house five turbines which crank out a nameplate capacity of about 185,000 kilowatts per day.  Fort Peck dam is the largest of six major dams spanning the Missouri River. Roughly 21,000 feet long and over 250 feet high it is the largest hydraulically filled dam in the U.S. Fort Peck Lake, is 134 miles long, with some 1800 miles of shoreline (California boast about 800 miles) and ranks as the fifth largest man-made lake in the country, by far the largest in Montana.

Fort Peck was a major project of the Public Works Administration and a major player in the New Deal. Construction began in 1933 and reached its peak in 1936 when over 10,000 workers were employed. The dam was completed in 1940 and began generating electricity in 1943. Known as "the government town" Fort Peck was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers with considerable help from workers employed to build the dam itself. Not much remains of the original town but a few buildings, such as the rec center and theatre are still utilized today. Interesting to note the theatre throughout construction showed movies 24-7 as well as live entertainment on a regular basis.

As time permits I'll be posting more interesting tidbits on this special Montana place...stay tuned.

One Damn Big Beaver Dam...

...has been discovered in a remote corner of sprawling Wood Buffalo State Park in northern Alberta. For a lot of you this is probably not new news as proof of its existence, a Google Earth image, has been widely disseminated on the internet now for a few weeks. But since I've been involved in your basic love/hate relationship with the toothsome rodents for as long as I can remember I just couldn't resist tossing in my two cents...no news there either, eh?

Anyway for those of you unaware the dam is humongous by any definition: 2700 feet long (850 meters) it is thought to be the longest anywhere and an ongoing project of a large clan of ambitious rodents since sometime in the early 1970s. As a fellow blogger noted, "I'll bet a lot of landowners are saying thank God it's not on my property." Beavers, neat as they can be and often are, can and often do put even the most heinous vandalism acts to shame. For example back in the day a family of busy beavers set up housekeeping on a small creek on our property.

Over that first summer they erected several small dams, a single somewhat larger dam and built an impressive house. Next spring, apparently concerned high water might be a problem the crew dug an impressive ditch which allowed overflow from the main dam to enter our man-made pond, then cut an equally impressive, after all we're talking beavers here not D-8s, overflow trench which eventually eroded such the dam collasped. Each time we tried to fix it, the beavers quickly remodeled the repairs to their own liking.

Meantime the dam building continued up the little creek until eventually there were 11 dams as I recall flooding at least 100 acres of what was once prime woodcock cover. Oh well, wood ducks found it their liking so for a time we switched loyalities and instead of woodcock we ate wood duck. During all of  this we engaged and engaged the services of others in a futile attempt to trap at least enough of the culprits to slow the advance...didn't happen.

After about 7 or 8 years however the food supply was starting to dwindle big time. Evidently in desperation instead of alder, aspen and willow the beavers started on our many wild and productive apple trees scattered about the property. But the proverbial straw that broke the beaver's strangle hold was an old apple tree which produced in odd years about the sweetest, tastiest apples imaginable and stood at least 400 yards from the nearest water. For us that did it. We enlisted the aid of former bomb disposal guy with handy access still to explosives and...that as they say was that. 

Do I still have a fondness in my soul for the big rodents? Hell yes. But to paraphrase the man "Glad that big dam ain't on my place.