Weekend trip

[begreen]

The boys and I headed east of the Cascades to see the Dry Falls and Grand Coulee Dam. The landscape is stark, huge and spectacular. We stayed at Dry Falls State Park which was a nice spot a couple miles south of Dry Falls. This is where the earth's largest known flood occurred at the end of the last ice age. An ice dam at the fork of the Clark River in Montana burst and released the waters of what is called Lake Missoula across Idaho and into WA, down the Columbia and eventually to the Pacific. The volume, some 5 pentillion gallons was equal to draining Lake Erie and Ontario in less than a week! It sculpted out 16 million year old lava flows to a depth of 500 ft creating the coulees or canyons of Eastern WA. We were standing on an upper rim, 500 ft above the bottom of the coulee and the sign said the water was 3-500 ft higher than where we stood!! Amazing.
Full moon from our campsite


Niagara Falls is huge, but it would be tiny in this landscape. There are boats down on the water there but they look like dust specks in the picture. The cars in the background are actually full sized pickups with camper bodies. The panorama is about 7 miles across. Imagine this whole are under 300 ft of raging water traveling at about 60mph.

 

[begreen]

Onward to Grand Coulee Dam, the world's largest concrete structure. There is enough concrete in it to wrap two 6 ft wide sidewalks around the world at the equator. This thing is huge. The curved tubes on powerhouse #3 at the left are 40ft inside diamter pipes.

The second shot is Grand Coulee Dam from about 4 miles away. It is a mile across the top. Lake Roosevelt behind the dam is 151 miles long. It reaches up to Canada. In spite of this being a very dry year the lake is only 3% below normal. Lots of water there. Besides making over 6,000 megawatts of power it irrigates an area the size of Delaware.

 

[HisTreeNut]

Sounds like a good time. Beautiful country up that way.

 

[Warm_in_NH]

Great pictures. BIG country out there.

 

[Jags]

Neat stuff. Hard to get the proper scale of things.

 

[begreen]

Indeed it is. The escarpment is about 450-500ft tall. Here's a shot of the debris pile left from building Grand Coulee Dam. Back east this would be a mountain. It's in the middle of the town of Grand Coulee next to the high school. We were told that the coach likes to send his football team scrambling up the hill to burn off a little steam.

 

[Hogwildz]

BG, I was just at Dry Falls at the end of August.
Love that place & Grand Coulee.

 

[begreen]

Very Cool! It's an awesome and amazing landscape.

 

[blacktail]

When I was at CWU, Dry Falls was my favorite place to fish. I spent a lot of Friday afternoons and evenings on that lake.

 

[Owen1508]

Awesome I ended up settling in NW Montana