The Corps’ dream project, Rampart Dam on the Yukon River, was, at last, an opportunity to show the world what it could really do. It wasn’t its size that was so breathtaking—although, with a speculative height of 530 feet and a length of 4,700 feet, it had the dimensions of Grand Coulee—as the size of the reservoir that would form behind it. Lake Rampart would become the largest reservoir in the world. It would cover 10,800 square miles, making it almost exactly the size of Lake Erie. And it was the power—five million kilowatts of it, two and a half times more than the initial output of Grand
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