Hungry Horse Dam

The name comes from horses — lost in a hard winter of the early 1900s, found a month later starving and weak, nursed back. So the story goes. That name attached itself to a mountain, a creek, a town, and eventually to this: a 564-foot concrete arch dam on the South Fork of the Flathead River, completed in 1953, that was at the time among the highest concrete dams in the world.

The Bureau of Reclamation built it for power and flood control. It was the first dam built with air-entrained concrete and fly ash in the mix — innovations meant to hold up against the freeze-thaw cycles of a Montana winter. Three million cubic yards of it went in. The construction claimed 23 men.

It delivers. About a billion kilowatt-hours come off the dam in a year. The water it stores and releases generates roughly 4.6 billion more on its way through the downstream plants — on the Flathead, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille, the Columbia. The road across the dam opened to the public on November 2, 1953, and it's still the way across.