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.
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.
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