Hungry Horse Dam: The Town Under the Water

Before they filled the reservoir, they moved the buildings they could move. Some were disassembled and rebuilt on higher ground. Others were too old or too fixed in place. The original town of Hungry Horse, Montana, a small community in the South Fork valley south of Glacier National Park, is now under several hundred feet of water. The families who had lived in that valley, some of them for generations, moved. The community they had built in the South Fork did not come with them.

The Hungry Horse Dam, completed in nineteen fifty-three on the South Fork of the Flathead River, is a concrete arch structure five hundred sixty-four feet high, making it one of the largest dams in the United States at the time of its completion. The power it generates flows into the Pacific Northwest grid, serving the region's electricity needs across a vast network that extends far beyond Montana.

The construction years, roughly nineteen forty-eight through nineteen fifty-three, turned a remote Montana valley into something closer to a boomtown. Several thousand workers were employed at peak construction, and the associated settlement drew the gambling operations, bars, and social disruption that the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell documented with a specificity that official dam histories tend to omit. It was not a quiet project.

The reservoir the dam created, Hungry Horse Reservoir, is approximately thirty-four miles long. On its west shore, a road follows the waterline past campgrounds and access points. There is no road to the original Hungry Horse townsite. No road could reach it now.

The dam produces clean power from a river that was here long before any of this, and will be here long after the dam itself has run its operational life. The valley it submerged, and the community it displaced, made no choice about whether to serve the Pacific Northwest grid.