The Grand Coulee Dam is Grand

On Saturday, August 13 we left Castle Rock, Oregon on our way to the Grand Coulee Dam. It was too far to drive in one day, so we spent the night at a KOA in Ellensburg. The wind got up late in the evening and we were reminded of home..:) On Sunday we drove on to Grand Coulee. On this route we went through valleys of apple orchards and other crops irrigated by the Banks Lake Reservoir created by the Grand Coulee Dam. Then there were great rolling hills covered with sage brush…..until it turned to coulees. Coulees are steep walled canyons formed by water. We learned that the coulees (Grand Coulee among them) were formed by a series of massive ice-age floods that occurred when ice damming the Glacial Lake Missoula melted 18,000 years ago. In fact, the Dry Falls, about 30 miles from Grand Coulee, is the site of the largest waterfall in the world, (back in the Ice Age), but now has no water.

We had a slight mishap when we got to the town of Grand Coulee. Lannas had made the reservations for the RV park and forwarded me a link to the directions. I printed them out and we followed them. When we got there Lannas said that he didn’t think this was the place he made reservations. Turned out he was correct. Luckily, the RV park where we actually had reservations was in the same town.

We had a great lunch at Pepper Jacks’s restaurant and then went on to tour the dam. We were kind of surprised that they still have tours of the dam. We had to go through a metal detector, could carry no bags on the tour, and a guy with a gun on his hip followed us around.

The Grand Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure and power plant in the United States. It is the seventh largest power generator in the world. The tour went to the newest of the three power plants at the dam. There are six huge turbines in this plant and we got to see one of them up close. After looking at the power plant we were taken to the top of the dam (it is closed to traffic). The thing is massive (almost a mile across at the top). In the evening we went to a laser light show that is played on the downstream face of the dam. Though normally there is very little flow from the spillway, they increase the flow out of the dam during the light show so it has a white background.