The Grand Coulee and the Carved Landscapes of Washington State

Banks Lake, near Grand Coulee, WA

On the suggestion of my friend Ben, a big-time Washington State booster, I included Grand Coulee Dam in my recent jackrabbit run through the national parks of the American West. He suspected that I couldn’t resist, since historic dams are among my favorite preservation projects. He was right about the dam - it was too tempting to miss. But nothing prepared me for what I saw after that.

Route through Grand Coulee, W

To get there, I followed scenic State Route 2 west out of Spokane, WA, passing through green rolling farmland and the small towns of Reardon and Davenport. It was Sunday morning, July 4th. The towns were exceptionally quiet, caught in the double rest-period of church services and a national holiday. At Wilbur, I detoured north towards Grand Coulee dam.

It wasn’t long before a line of utility towers crested a distant hill to my left. Another group of towers approached from the right, eventually stretching their power lines  across the road. Yet another set of lines branched  off eastward beyond it.The green and fertile uplands west of Spokane gave way to sagebrush and rocky outcrops as I descended into the Columbia River basin. Lake Roosevelt, the water impounded by the Grand Coulee dam, was the first glimpse I had of the actual river as I dropped into the valley, which was about a thousand feet lower than the farmlands. By the time I arrived at the town of Grand Coulee, just west of the dam, the air felt hot and parched. The landscape had taken on the soft colors of the desert – grey-green sage, ochre and straw-yellow grasses. Dark green pine trees stippled the banks of the river near town.

Just the Dam Facts

Grand Coulee Dam, on the Columbia River near Grand Coulee, WA

The Grand Coulee Dam is a mile-long concrete gravity dam spanning the banks of the Columbia River in eastern Washington State. It was commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and built in the years 1933 – 1941, during the depths of the Depression. It was considered one of the brightest stars among the constellation of Roosevelt’s New Deal projects. This ambitious public works project employed several thousands of workers at a time. Its hydropower was intended to open new prosperity in the Northwest through electricity generation and irrigation of the arid lands of Eastern Washington. It was recently reported to be the fifth largest producer of electricity in the world. After its completion in 1941, it was billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” And, until the completion of the Three Gorges Dam over the Yangtze River in China in 2006 some 60 years later, it held onto its record as the largest concrete structure in the world. It is still the largest concrete structure in the United States.

The Grand Coulee dam was the first of some eleven built by the federal government to harness the powerful Columbia for irrigation and electricity generation. The dams – among other things – decimated the salmon population that was the lifeblood of the Colville tribe and others, forever changing the native culture and its way of life. On the other hand, these dams put many thousands of people to work during the Depression and generate much of the electricity that powers the homes and businesses of the Northwest.

Those basic facts about the damming of the Columbia River only scratch the surface of the river's story. Each one of the sentences of the preceding paragraphs could generate a book. Some already have. The history, economics, politics and culture of this region are among the most complex, conflicted, and intertwined of any area of the United States. A wonderfully comprehensive, well-researched book on many of these topics was written by Washington native Blaine Harden under the title A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (1996).

But my visit to the dam turned out to be only the prelude to my real investigations of Grand Coulee. The 1930s dam was modern history -- a sidebar to a much older, and more curious, story of the region.

Lost in the Landscape

To find my way back south toward Route 2, I followed “Coulee Boulevard,” the road that goes through  Electric City then southwest along Banks Lake, a large reservoir that now fills the coulee. It was named for Frank A. Banks, chief construction engineer of Grand Coulee dam.

Basalt cliffs in the Grand Coulee, near Steamboat Rock State Park, WA

The landscape of Grand Coulee mystifies. Its towering sides are made of "flood basalt" that flowed across much of the region some 15 million years ago. At the north end of the reservoir, the silt floor of the coulee is well above the water line, enough to support a cluster of buildings - one of Electric City's neighborhoods.

Steamboat Rock, Banks Lake, Grand Coulee, WA

Soon after you leave the built-up area, you round the top of a hill and can look far to the southwest, where the breathtaking, vast landscape of the Grand Coulee stretches ahead for 27 miles. The wind blows constantly – at least when I was there – whirling up small dust-devils on the Steamboat Rock peninsula, which juts into the center of the Banks Lake. “What happened here?” I wondered. What are these cliffs all about?

Dust Devils, Steamboat Rock State Park, Grand Coulee, WA

I continued to follow the reservoir southwest, ending up in Coulee City, where I passed below the south end of the reservoir. In another mile, I turned southwest on Route 17, towards Ephrata. Yakima was my ultimate destination, my jumping off place for the trip into Mt. Rainier National Park.

Dry Falls Heritage Area as seen from Route 17 near Coulee City, WA

A few miles out of Coulee City, the landscape off to the east was just as curious as was the Grand Coulee. I stopped the car on a cinder pullout and looked across the top of a large sweep of barren plain, marked with more deep coulees that were carved into the landscape. I didn’t realize it then, but I was looking into the Dry Falls, a 3-1/2 mile long precipice that is thought to have been the largest one-time waterfall in the history of the world. And that opens the most intriguing story about this place.

The Ice Dam of Glacial Lake Missoula

The Grand Coulee and the Dry Falls and much of the Northwest are areas shaped by one of the most violent events of nature in the history of the world: the Ice Age Floods. First hypothesized in the 1920s by J Harlen Bretz (with no period after “J” according to his preference), the theory of ice age floods that etched devastating scars on the land was not really accepted until the 1960s. Bretz, investigating the “Scablands” of eastern Washington State, came to believe that they were the result massive floods through the area, although he couldn’t figure out where the water came from.

Later research ultimately determined that an ice dam that had built up at the mouth of the Clark Fork River near what is now Sand Point, Idaho. The resulting lake – Glacial Lake Missoula – was estimated to be 2000 feet deep and stretched eastward across southwest Montana for some 200 miles. At some point between  80,000 and 10,000 years ago, the ice dam gave way, releasing hundreds of tons of water across the northwest with incredible speed and force. From a recent study by Jones and Jones (2001), sponsored by the National Park Service:

When the highest of these ice dams failed, lake water burst through, shooting out at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world. [...] This towering mass of water and ice literally shook the ground as it thundered toward the Pacific Ocean, stripping away hundreds of feet of soil and cutting deep canyons— ”coulees”—into the underlying bedrock. With flood speeds approaching 65 miles per hour, the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours. [Jones et al., 2001: 13].

Many times over the next 2,500 years the Clark Fork dam repeatedly formed and failed, leaving its indelible marks on the scoured landscape, until finally the ice sheet retreated into Canada. Until Bretz, apparently, no one had put all this together. In recent decades, a number of scholars have explored this topic.

Geologists and advocates in the Northwest such as the Ice Age Floods Institute, formed in 1995 to promote public recognition of these ancient floods, have pressed for the creation of a heritage area that will help visitors interpret the bizarre landscape.

On March 9, 2009, they got their wish. On that date, President Obama signed the “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009” into law (Public Law 111 – 11), which included the designation of the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail. No funding was included in the bill, but according to the Institute, “the National Park Service would oversee the geologic trail, which would cost an estimated $8 million to $12 million to create.” A preliminary map had already been made a part of the public record in 2004. So now the work begins - laying out routes, establishing the best viewpoints, designing the signs, and … maybe even building a visitor center. It's a fascinating story. One the public will surely appreciate.

Bretz was the first to unlock the mystery, as chronicled in the fascinating book by John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood. For Bretz, there were no books to consult; no Google Earth; no websites with helpful information.  He poured over incomplete topographical maps; tested soils; compared the altitudes of various features to calculate the estimated maximum depths of the floodwaters. Even with this enormous effort, he endured the scorn of colleagues who didn’t buy into his theories for decades.

For me, little can compare with my sense of discovery as I passed through the region and since. Rather than having the answers spelled out on an interpretive plaque, I could pursue them myself – questioning, researching, reading, reviewing my photographs again and again, looking for clues, tracing my path on my atlas and aerial maps.  I imagine that Bretz himself, possessed by the task of unlocking the mystery the landscape presented, must have experienced enormous satisfaction in fulfilling his quest. My journey was a minor dalliance in comparison. I am enormously grateful to all those scientists and lovers of geology who have, since Bretz, written the books and papers that can answer questions my trip through the region provoked.

For this study, I owe special thanks to friend Ben, who encouraged me to see as much of his beloved Washington State as possible before I returned “Back East.” The spirit of discovery, pursuit of research questions, the Ice Age Floods, the dam that was once the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Grand Coulee, and the Dry Falls – all of these were included in one 50-mile diversion that was one of the best parts of my tour through the West.

PARTIAL SAMPLING OF RESOURCES:

Grand Coulee Dam:

Grand Coulee Dam. Official Website. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Pacific Northwest Region. URL http://www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/index.html accessed September 18, 2010.

Gregory, James, Mark Jenkins, and Sarah Nash Gates, Project Directors. “Grand Coulee Dam: Leaving a Legacy.” The Great Depression in Washington State Project. Multi-media website. University of Washington, Seattle, WA. URL accessed September 18, 2010 http://depts.washington.edu/depress/grand_coulee.shtml

Harden, Blaine. A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

State of Washington. Grand Coulee Dam: 8th Wonder of the World. Souvenir pamphlet. Davenport WA: Times Publishing Company, 1947.

“A Walk Through Time.” The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Official Website. URL http://www.colvilletribes.com/past.htm accessed 13 October 2010.

Ice Age Floods:

Allen, John Elliott, Marjorie Burns, and Scott Burns. Cataclysms on the Columbia: the Great Missoula Floods. 1986. 2nd Ed. Portland OR: Ooligan Press, Portland State University, 2009.

Associated Press. “Ice age floods trail opens in Washington.” OregonLive.com. Website. Published May 28, 2009. URL accessed 13 October 2010. http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2009/05/ice_age_floods_trail_opens_in.html

Bjornstad, Bruce. On the Trail of the Ice Age Flood: A geological field guide to the Mid-Columbia Basin. Sandpoint, Idaho: Keokee Co. Publishing, Inc., 2008.

Foster, Tom. Huge Floods. Website. URL http://hugefloods.com/ accessed 13 October 2010. Pasco WA: Tom Foster, 2010.

Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects (Jones, Grant, Ilze Jones, and Johnpaul Jones, Principals). Ice Age Floods: Study of Alternatives and Environmental Assessment Following the Pathways of the Glacial Lake Missoula Floods. Study funded by the National Park Service through its Special Resource Study Program. Seattle WA: Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects, February 2001. URL http://www.nps.gov/iceagefloods/

"The National Geologic Trail." Ice Age Floods Institute. Website. URL https://www.iafi.org/?s=geologic+trail accessed 2 February 2024.

Soennichsen, John. Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood. Seattle WA: Sasquatch Books, 2008.

Weis, Paul L. and William L. Newman. The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington: The Geologic Story of the Spokane Flood. Washington DC: U.S. Department of the Interior/ Geological Survey (USGS), 2006. Online book. URL http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/geology/publications/inf/72-2/index.htm  accessed December 6, 2010.

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