Ask at the Guard Station, Bonneville Dam

Bonneville Dam was completed in 1938 after five years of New Deal construction on the Columbia River Gorge, straddling the Oregon–Washington line about 40 miles east of Portland. By 1970 it had been running for 32 years and had settled into a secondary life as a tourist destination — this brochure was part of that effort, offering visitors a fold-out map showing the picnic area on Bradford Island, the Oregon State Fish Hatchery on the south bank, and a reminder that the dam area was open during daylight hours, with first aid available at the guard station.

The interior spec sheet covers three sections: powerhouse, navigation lock, and fishways. The Kaplan turbines listed in the powerhouse block are a propeller-type design with adjustable-pitch blades, invented by Austrian engineer Viktor Kaplan, who filed the patent in 1912. The runners — nearly 24 feet across — could each discharge 5.8 million gallons per minute. The 518,400-kilowatt total listed here reflects only the original powerhouse; Congress had authorized a second one in 1968, and construction on the Washington bank began in 1974, adding another 558 megawatts when it came online in 1981.

The fishways section quietly records one of the dam's most expensive design compromises. Three fish ladders — each 1,312 feet long, dropping just one foot between every 16-foot pool — were built to carry salmon and steelhead 60 feet past the dam. The Corps had originally budgeted $640,000 for fish passage; sustained pressure from fishing interests drove actual costs past $7 million. Three separate "fishlocks" (enclosed elevator chambers, 30 by 20 feet and 105 feet tall) handle fish unwilling to use the ladders, and six fingerling by-passes route juvenile downstream migrants around the turbines.

The back panel's visitor map — printed in blue and red — marks the restricted zones with hatching and notes "NO VISITORS PERMITTED ON THE DAM." A small cartoon sailor in the upper right suggests the brochure was aimed partly at recreational boaters transiting the navigation lock (500 feet long, rated for ships up to 8,000 tons, filling or emptying in roughly 15 minutes). A note at the bottom directs visitors wanting navigation charts to the "U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 314 U.S. Court House, Portland, Oregon 97205" — an agency that was merged into the newly created NOAA in October 1970, the same year this brochure was printed.