This one could have been a little
better than it will be, but I wasn't really thinking about this when
I had the chance.
The good news, though, is that it does
give me a chance to talk a little history here anyway.
See, these pictures were taken at a
place called Lake Pactola, or at least one end of it. It's an
interesting place with kind of an unfortunate history, if I
understand things correctly.
While the dam that the lake is named
after had been there for awhile prior to a major thunderstorm that
came through in the early 1970s, it got some major upgrades as a
result. This is because the storm in question was one of those “all
the rain” and “all the flooding” sort of things.
Given how slowly the storm moved
through the area relative to its strenght, it wound up dumping 15
inches of rain over a large portion of the area, which wound up
costing more than 200 people their lives and damaged or wrecked more
than 2000 buildings just in Rapid City. Such damage was a fairly
common thing in several counties in the area as well.
As a means of preventing such a tragedy
from happening again, there was some major expansion to the Pactola
Dam, built in 1952 to control the flow of Rapid Creek. In
retrospect, I should have taken a few pictures when I was at the dam.
It's actually quite the sight, best viewed in person.
There's this place where people can
pull off the road and look down at the lake from the top of the dam.
Part of the reason I didn't get any pictures, or at least any I
thought were worth keeping, is because it's several hundred feet from
the top of the dam to the surface of the lake, which is somewhere in
the area of a hundred feet deep itself at the face of the dam, as I
understand it, and I've got this fear of heights that I've had for
most of my life. As a result, I was kind of worried about dropping
my phone over the edge while I was taking pictures, which would not
have been good. On the bright side, it's a good reason to get people
into the area to see it, if they're interested.
As someone who worked in the area for a
couple summers and has been a visitor to the area quite a few times
over the course of my 40 years or so, I should say there's more to do
there than just look, of course, especially if you're there in the
summer. I've just never done much at Pactola itself, mostly because
I'm not often there during peak season, and when I was there, there
were other places I preferred going because they were much less busy
and didn't involve views that triggered my fear of heights to quite
the same extent.
With all that in mind, this wouldn't be
what I'm saying it is if there weren't pictures to share. I did get
pictures from the upstream end of the lake, where things weren't
quite so steep and there was considerably less water involved. There
were also considerably more cows than fish in that part of the lake
as a result:
The one looking at the camera was
probably wondering if I was a threat, or what I was doing. Like I
said in my Wasta
post, it had been a dry year in general out west, and longer than
that in the Hills. There might have been water where there was bare
ground recently, but I've seen it where there was grass growing, too.
But even that was kind of low, which is why my bovine subject went
trekking on a moment later:
All in all, Pactola Lake is an
interesting place to visit, and there's some cool stuff to do there
if you're there the right time of year. Worth checking out, and
maybe seeing some history at the same time.
I've got one more set of pictures to
work with here, and hopefully it'll be a better post than this one.
But that will come later. There are a few things I want to get up
here first. Until then, happy viewing and happy travels, my friends.
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