Bonneville Dam

Well we finally made it to Bonneville Dam.  It is located about 40 miles east of Portland on I-84.  We walked around the grounds of the fish hatchery, fed the large rainbow trout in one of the holding ponds, found Herman the Sturgeon in another pond.  The area is nicely landscaped and also has a large gift shop to accomodate the 500,000 annual visitors to the dam.  The dam itself is a mile from the first area and drive is intersting because the roadway travels through a guarded gate, across a narrow bridge just below the locks and then along the dam itself.  The visitor center at the dam has four levels.  The greeting area and gift shop is actually the third floor.  It is staffed by several volunteers who live in their RVs nearby on one of the islands created for the facilities.  The top level is for an overall view of the area.  The second level has two theaters, and the bottom level has the viewing windows for the fish ladders.  The fish ladders are provided to give the salmon a way to swim upstream around the dam.  How well they work is a question, but they are better than having no ladder at all.  The viewing level also contained the room that contained the person who counted every fish that swam up the ladder.  Imagine having that job!  Not the most exciting job in the world!
     2pm brought a tour complete with a ranger wearing the tradition green and gray uniform and smoky bear hat.  She, however, and the other rangers here, are employed by the Army Corp of Engineers so they have the "castle" emblem on their sleeves instead of the NPS emblem.  The talk was mostly about how the system of dams works, but we did get to walk over to the historic power house where there are eight huge turbines generating the electricity that is powering this computer as I write this.

  After finishing the tour we stopped to visit with one of the volunteers to find out information on volunteering at Bonneville.  On our way back we detoured to the picnic ground which is adjacent to the volunteer campground.  The area aeems very nice but I'm sure that it is always windy because we noticed that several folks had put up some sort of wind breaks around their picnic tables to slow it down.  Kinda like being at the coast.  The volunteer we talked to did tell us that there is also a vistor center on the Washington side as well and the power house tour there actually takes you right on top of the turbines and you can feel their vibrations.  Another time perhaps.