Jackson Lake Dam

Slow down. The next left is Dam Overlook, with restrooms, and the speed drops to about twenty-five miles an hour ahead. If you want a stop along this lake, make it this one, because past the dam there's a signed stretch, on toward the junction, where nobody may stop, stand or park, whatever's out in the willows. Turn left when you leave, across the dam. Park here and stay a few minutes, and there's more. Use the restrooms if you can. Past here it's a summer pit toilet at Pacific Creek Landing on your right, about five miles on, then about nine miles more to the next one. You're looking at two lakes at once. Under the reservoir sits a natural lake up to four hundred feet deep, cut by a glacier coming off the Yellowstone Plateau. This dam raises the water on top of it as much as thirty-nine feet, and the lake grew by a third. It took two tries. The first dam here was a log crib, finished in nineteen oh seven. It failed in nineteen ten, and the water swept away Ben Sheffield's toll bridge downstream at Moran. Frank Crowe directed the reconstruction that year, with crews working through the winter on concrete. Two decades later, Crowe was running the job at Hoover Dam. Now ask who all this water is for. It isn't this valley. The dam stores eight hundred and forty-seven thousand acre feet for farms in Idaho, and none of it was used to irrigate Jackson Hole. By late summer the lake can be nearly gone from some shorelines, so the view depends on the week you come. Nobody cleared the shore when this water rose, so it drowned the forest where it stood. If you've parked, stay with me, and I'll tell you what that ugly shoreline went on to save.