that wrecking ball must have been quite something to see in action. The dam took five years to build as construction shut down every winter, and crews labored to clear thousands of trees from the site, a job accomplished by chaining a huge, 4½-ton steel ball to a couple of tractors and pulling it through dead timber and over stumps left by loggers. One contractor built an iron drag shaped like an umbrella to gather the timber into a pile for burning. When Hungry Horse Reservoir inundated a fire lookout tower, the Bureau of Reclamation rebuilt it elsewhere, along with U.S. Forest Service roads, bridges, and buildings.
Hungry Horse was built not for irrigation, as were so many other Reclamation dams, but to provide water storage that could be used to increase hydroelectric power production at Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams, downstream on the Columbia River.