Departing Cascade Locks, Oregon today, we stopped at the Bonneville Dam and power plant en route to the Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier area. The Bonneville Dam is an interesting tour for geeks, with a close up view of the generators inside the power house. at least my seven year old and I found it interesting, the rest of the family looked glazed over. This 70 year old facility, built in the Teddy Roosevelt days produces a million kilowatts of power and is currently being outfitted with new turbines that will be more efficient and kill less fish. Speaking of fish, since they dammed the river, they had to make provision for the spawning fish to swim upstream so they built a bypass around the dam consisting of stairs that allow the fish to swim up the steps to rise the 60 feet of elevation created by the dam. They call this stairway the fish ladder. Below the ladder is a window where you can see the fish swim by. there is a person there that also counts the fish, number and species. I would rather have a daily root canal. My daughter bought a button there that said "I took the dam tour". I thought it fitting.
We found a RV park with good internet (Qwest is the provider, like 5 hops to my router back in Texas, nice...) and it has a good meg of upload capability so I uploaded all my photos from my MAcBook. Take a look at the trip HERE.
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