Dam and blast it........or maybe the other way round?

Today we could mostly be found up the mountain trail from Revelstoke to where a feat of human engineering sits calmly and quietly producing enough electrical power to supply almost a million homes. The Revelstoke dam. At 400 feet high and 3800 feet wide, it puts Stithians dam to shame. They measure the water held back not in cubic anything but in acres, 1,240,000 of them. More statistics, it took 5 years in planning and 8 years to build using 4 million cubic metres of concrete and almost the same amount of glacial mud and rocks. There are 5 turbines each weighing over 400 tonnes and a sixth is planned. The turbines are built in Brazil being brought by barge and road with specially designed trailers as long as Cornwall! Puts me towing my trailer into perspective.

The river what the dam holds back is the Columbia river, 4th largest in north America and begins way up draining the Rockies for 4000 km to the Pacific ocean. From between its outlet in the US there are 9 other dams before this one and I think she said another 3 beyond. The first dam in the US was built in 1930 and was hailed as an engineering wonder. Soon to follow was a series of further dams to meet the needs of the ever expanding populations of the US and Canada, but not the natives who for countless generations had relied on the Columbia for their staple diet of salmon. The dam builders had neglected to build in any kind of "fish stair" to allow the salmon to swim upstream to spawn as they had for ever, effectively cutting off the trail. To this day the Canadian government are petitioning the US to retro install such devices and to allow the fish to return. Some hope, however, the lake is stocked with trout and sturgeon and maybe one day, salmon.

We went back downtown for lunch in a bar called The Village Idiot, Strangely I felt right at home there.