Grand Coulee and Steamboat Rock

After our introduction to coulees on our drive to this new-to-us area of Washington, we are heading to the town of Grand Coulee today. This town sprung to life with the building of the Grand Coulee Dam back in the 1930's. This dam is famous for all kinds of reasons. Grand Coulee Dam is one of the largest concrete structures in the world, and the second biggest dam in the world. Even from far away, we couldn't fit the entire dam into one picture. There is enough concrete in this dam to build a sidewalk around the earth at the equator TWICE. That's a huge dam, so we had to take a tour!

After going through security, we rode a bus onto the dam. This road has been closed to public traffic since 911, but security-worthy tourist get to take pictures from the dam. In the background we can see where some of the electric generators are housed. The Grand Coulee Dam produces more hydro-electric energy than any other dam in the United States. That's 21 billion kilowatt-hours, and we can't even wrap our minds around what that means.

From his spot on the dam, Mark could also see the source of all that hydro-power. That's the mighty Columbia River rolling on toward the Pacific Ocean. 

This dam is 550 feet tall, so the view down to the water looks like some massive water slide that wouldn't end well.

From the other side of the dam, we can see Roosevelt Lake. This was one of FDR's projects to put the United States back to work during the depression of the 1930's. It brought thousands of unemployed men from all over the country to Washington, and gave them jobs they desperately needed. There are lots of amazing things about this massive project, but one of the most notable is the fact that it finished ahead of time and under-budget.

The other part of our tour was through the pumping station. These huge pump generators are used to pump water out of Roosevelt Lake towards the canals that will water the fruit trees we are so fond of. So Roosevelt's plan to build Coulee Dam not only provided enough electricity to light up the Northwest, it also provided the water to turn its desert to green.

Now that we have completed the educational part of our day, it's time for some exercise. We're driving towards one of the iconic coulees of this area, and its hard to capture its size. That steamboat-shaped rock is called Steamboat Rock at Steamboat Rock State Park. (That might be a record for the number of times the word "steamboat" can be used in one sentence.)

That rock has a silhouette much like a steamboat, but it's bigger than an ocean liner. In fact, it's a couple miles long, and a mile wide. As we hiked closer, we were glad that the sun was sinking in the sky so the hike up was in the shadows.

The hike was steep, and much of it was on loose rock called scree. Denisa is working pretty hard getting up to that top plateau 800 feet above the lake.

We got a close-up look at some of the basalt columns that were formed during one of the volcanic eruptions that originally formed the backbone of the coulees in this area.

Once we finally made it to the very top of Steamboat Rock, we were amazed at how big it was. We were also amazed to see it was covered with golden grass, instead of the rocky top we expected. We walked this trail through the tall grass for almost a mile to get to the northern tip.

From there we could see more of the coulees that surround Banks Lake. The tiny dots in the blue water are full-sized boats far below.

We climbed to the very top of the Steamboat, and you can see Mark holding up his arms at the top.

We wanted to get a shot of the straight drop-offs at the edges of Steamboat Rock, and how far we had climbed. But we also had to respect the warnings we had read about the crumbly nature of this volcanic rock. So we stayed away from those crumbly edges.

It was another 1.5 mile hike on the top of Steamboat Rock to get to the other edge. The sun was setting and turning everything to gold as we made our last ascent to the highest peak on the other end of this big rock.

There are no pictures as we skidded down that loose scree to get back to the bottom of Steamboat Rock. It was almost harder going down because the volcanic rock kept sliding under our feet. But we were on a schedule, and we needed to get back to Grand Coulee Dam. That's because there is a laser light show that is projected against the dam every evening at 10:00. They open the water gates at the top of the dam to change that mile-long concrete face into a giant white screen. The laser host of the show knows something about building dams--a beaver.

The thirty-minute laser show told about the history of this area, and the process of building the dam. It was beautiful and entertaining at the same time. It should be impressive, since it was developed at a cost of 1.6 million dollars. This laser eagle is stretching his wings over a half-mile section of the dam at the end of the show.

After such a late night show, we still had a 40-minute drive home. It was a late night, but a great day as we experienced more of these cool coulees.