Fort Peck Dam and Lake

In 1933 the federal government chose the Missouri River in northeast Montana for one of the largest public works projects in the nation. The goal was ambitious: control the river's floods, improve downstream navigation, generate hydroelectric power, and, above all, employ thousands of men when a third of the country was out of work. Construction ran from 1934 to 1940.

The dam was built by hydraulic fill, a method that used water to sluice and place millions of cubic yards of earth into an enormous embankment. When it was finished it held more than 125 million cubic yards of fill and was the largest earth-fill dam in the world. More than eighty years later it remains the largest hydraulic-fill dam in the United States, and its powerhouse still generates electricity.

To build the dam, the government also had to build a place for the workers to live, and the planned town of Fort Peck rose almost overnight. Around it sprawled a ring of rough shantytowns with names like Wheeler and New Deal, where thousands of workers and their families crowded into the boom. Fort Peck's construction became a symbol of the era, famous enough that a photograph of the dam's spillway appeared on the very first cover of Life magazine in 1936.

Much of that built world survives. The New Deal town still has its 1930s hotel and its theatre, and the interpretive center below the dam tells the human story of the project through firsthand worker accounts. It is one of the rare places where you can stand inside a Depression-era public works effort that is still doing its job.

Fort Peck Lake fills a long, branching stretch of the old Missouri River valley, and its bays and arms give it that improbably long shoreline. The reservoir is a serious fishing destination, known for walleye, northern pike, lake trout, chinook salmon, and the prehistoric-looking paddlefish that run below the dam in spring.

The water sits inside the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, more than a million acres of badlands, breaks, and native prairie surrounding the lake. That means the shoreline stays wild: instead of marinas and houses, you get eroded clay hills, sagebrush flats, and long empty horizons that look much as they did when Lewis and Clark passed through.

The refuge around the lake is one of the best wildlife areas in Montana. Elk, bighorn sheep, mule deer, pronghorn, and prairie dogs live in the breaks, and in fall the elk bugle across the badlands. The prairie and water draw sharp-tailed grouse, sage grouse, pelicans, and huge numbers of migrating waterfowl, and this is deep fossil country too, where dinosaur bones weather out of the same clay hills.

Late spring through early fall is the season, roughly May to September, when the boating, fishing, and wildlife viewing are all at their best and the theatre is running. The country is beautiful but exposed, so summer heat and sudden storms are real, and winters here are long, cold, and quiet.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.