Monticello Dam in Napa County, California (aka: Morning Glory Hole)
-
View Member Photos
Category: Educational
Tags: dam, hole, morning glory, spillway
Comments: 6
Monticello Dam in Napa County, California (aka: Morning Glory Hole)

Comments

Precious_Cargo_Diving - 5/09/2012 12:12 PM
Brain, that is a great story... the dumb things we did when we were younger!
Greg - 5/08/2012 3:09 PM
Monticello Dam is a dam in Napa County, California, United States constructed between 1953 and 1957. It is a medium concrete-arch dam with a structural height of 304 ft (93 m) and a crest length of 1,023 ft (312 m). It contains 326,000 cubic yards (249,000 m³) of concrete. The dam impounded Putah Creek to cover the former town of Monticello and flood Berryessa Valley to create Lake Berryessa, then the second-largest man-made lake in California. The capacity of the reservoir is 1,602,000 acre·ft (1.976×109 m3).[1] Water from the reservoir primarily supplies agriculture in surrounding areas. The dam is noted for its classic, uncontrolled morning-glory type spillway.[1] The diameter at the lip is 72 ft (22 m). Locally, the spillway is also known as ’The Glory Hole’. [2]

The Monticello Dam Powerplant was built at the dam in 1983 and has three generators. The electrical power is sent mostly to the North Bay area of San Francisco.
zielit - 5/09/2012 6:08 AM
That’s a one big a$$ drain pipe :)
hcdiveteambrian - 5/09/2012 9:16 AM
These spillway devices built into river and stream beds are intense. One (I can’t find it on google earth, it must be submerged) around Crawley lake were made up of 2 gigantic tubes that went into the earth at an angle steeper than 45 degrees. We could hear water raging in them, somewhere in the hole. I think it was the beginning of the LA Aquaduct! Anyway we were like young, early 20s. And what do you think we did? Yep! We’re like "Hey lets go down there!!" Not a good idea. We started until one of us slipped and disappeared, down, gone. A 20 seconds later, here he comes running like a spider up. His shorts were ground off. His butt looked like bleeding hamburger.
Greg - 5/10/2012 5:14 AM
Man, that is crazy! Did you know the drain pipe was clear of rails or guards? Please tell me you got pictures of this :)
hcdiveteambrian - 5/10/2012 9:52 AM
"Man, that is crazy! Did you know the drain pipe was clear of rails or guards? Please tell me you got pictures of this :)" No pictures!! I’ll remember it forever it was that scary! The Monticello is pretty interesting!! Another "non diving" water project to check out is The LA aquaduct(s) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct engineered by William Mulholland, and another project which would have been a beautiful dive site had it not failed, to create the second largest loss of life from a disaster in the 20th century, that project was the Francis Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam , and Mulholland’s engineering days were done.