Dam Fieldtrip

So... when your Dad works with dams you get pretty excited about dam things. Dam things like dam spillways and dam tours and dam field trips and big dams and little dams and dam reservoirs. ...AND you get SUPER excited when you hear about DAM SPILLOVERS!! So excited in fact, that you have an uncontrollable desire to drive for HOURS just to see the dam! Oh yes... your heart rate is up just thinking about dams isn't it?!

My family recently attended a family reunion in Altamont... a little city near-ish Vernal (in Duchesne County). Of course my family NEVER goes on a "vacation" without stopping to check out the water in the area. (By "water" I refer to things such as creeks or ponds in the area where a dam has been built or may be built... or streams and rivers that are unusual, unusual because of rock formations or fish or unusual because of where the water comes from or is diverted to... sometimes we even take field trips to see things water has done, like a land or mud slide. I bet you are ALL wishing you could come with us on vacation huh?). Well on the way to the family reunion my family stopped at Stillwater Dam to see it spilling over. The sight was SO impressive that they convinced my dad to see if we could get a tour. (Yah... we're nerds... but believe me, if you saw this dam in person you'd be begging for a tour also.) I unfortunately missed the family reunion the end of June, but i was lucky enough to get to drive back out to Duchesne for the dam tour in July!

Our dam tour guide took us past the locked dam gates and let us walk across the top of the dam! This man seriously offers one of the best dam tours I've ever been on... he was passionate about his love of dams! He told us all kinds of super interesting facts about the dam. We not only got to walk on top of the dam... but he also let us go INSIDE the dam (and he even LOCKED us inside the dam for a short while... that was a little creepy... good thing he came back for us). We got to climb down a spiral staircase (5 stories high) to get lower into the dam. Even my grandma (who recently had back surgery) couldn't turn down that opportunity!

On top of Upper Stillwater Dam: Dad, Grandpa, Grandma, Amy (in the colorful blanket... she forgot to bring a jacket), some guy who knew the Dam Tour Guide, the Dam Tour Guide, Mom, JoyAnne.On our Dam Tour the guide kept mentioning "The Gallery" down inside the dam. Silly me, I was imagining that maybe they had a photo gallery with pictures of the dam or its history or something. We were lucky enough to go inside the dam to "The Gallery"... turns out "The Gallery" is just a long, long, very long tunnel from one end of the dam to the other end of the dam. It was an impressively LONG tunnel. (There was a bit of water inside the dam, but apparently all dams leak a tiny bit of water.... the leaking water is constantly monitored to make sure the dam is not leaking too quickly to jeopardize the safety of the dam.)
After our tour we had a fun dam picnic in a nearby camp ground. A thunderstorm, a MASSIVE thunderstorm rolled in just as we were finishing up our lunch. Some extremely nice campers nearby brought us an umbrella to use. I thought that was so, so, so nice since they didn't even know us!

Seriously... is a family REALLY complete without a family portrait in front of the dam?The dam is actually designed to spillover like this... it just rarely happens so its so exciting when it actually does spill over this much water!

The dam securityThis is down below the dam. JoyAnne is beckoning me to come closer, and closer, and closer. Notice the smashed up fence? That is from a tree that fell over the top of the dam a few days earlier.

View from the top of the dam looking down...