Last night the wind came up around dark and took care of all the loose small items in the campground. All the surfaces in Coulee Playland Resort were very clean this morning.
This morning Peggy was the early riser rolling out of bed just after 6:00 AM. This was strange behavior because, in our dotage, we have sort of agreed on no early-morning shenanigans prior to 7:30. It was a beautiful morning and a little early rising was worth it. We were free to explore for the day so we hopped into Charlotte for a spin around the Grand Coulee area.
Our first destination was the Grand Coulee Dam. It is a monster that is certainly larger than any I have seen before. Many thick conductors lead away from the dam’s powerhouses. Trapped behind the dam is Lake Roosevelt which is really the backed-up Spokane and Columbia Rivers and Banks Lake which extends for about 30 miles to Coulee City.
We drove over a bridge north of the dam, crossing what is now solely the Columbia River. We turned north down the river on WA-155 towards the tiny town of Belvidere on a road that climbs the giant palisade walls of the gorge. The terrain here is extremely rugged. Even on foot, you could only move back and forth along the edge of the river. The walls of the gorge are giant palisades of columnar basalt and about the only way up, other than the road, is with ropes, pitons and lots of other pricey climbing gear.
When we got to Belvidere we turned around and headed back towards the dam taking a short side trip through a slightly less tiny town of Elmer City. It was a nice little sliver of land between the highway and the Columbia and looks to be one of the very few places to build within this corridor. The Columbia is just released from the dam only a few miles upstream and the current is open for business here.
We crossed back over the river, passed by our RV park in Electric City and headed south along the east edge of the enormous Banks Lake. More gigantic palisades of basalt line the shores of the lake almost all the way to Coulee City at the south end of the lake. This extremely rugged country is also very beautiful with the enormous rock cliffs bordering the deep blue lake. We took advantage of the many turnouts along WA-155 where you can pull out and admire the great scenery.
At the south end of Banks Lake we joined up with US-2 for a short drive to a place called Dry Falls. There is a beautiful example of what an enormous waterfall would look like without the water. Near the end of the Ice Age, the Columbia Basin was blocked by two enormous glacial lakes, one backing water up all the way to Montana. Things got warmer and when the ice dams broke, a water volume equal to 10 times the flow of all the current rivers in the world came crashing through here and got pitched off the 400 hundred foot high cliffs. This flow also dug out some pretty big divots in the river bottom below the falls in a series of plunge pools. It must have been extremely violent. The evidence of scouring action can be seen all the way along Banks Lake, the path taken by some of the really big floods.
On the way back from Dry Falls, we pulled out at Steamboat Rock State Park. We bought a Washington state parks year-long pass earlier this year at Lake Wenatchee. We got to use it today and avoided the $10 entry fee. The park appears to be very nice with RV camp spots with full hookups, a small store, cabins and beautiful scenery of Banks Lake and the looming Steamboat Rock.
We continued a bit further north on 155 and soon turned off to visit a spot called Northrup Cove. A quarter mile or so down the access road and we came to a small lagoon. When we stopped to take a picture of the lagoon, I stupidly rolled down my passenger window and stuck the camera out the hole just as I noticed swarms of mosquitoes urgently flying in all the openings. I quickly tripped the shutter and we started slowly moving while pointlessly flailing at the almost-transparent flying vermin. After about 5 miles with the windows alternately open and closed in attempts to have the tiny bastards sucked out through the miracle of aerodynamics, we suspected we were flying pest-free and started to relax.
We headed back to our RV spot in Electric City and had some late lunch before napping. Retirement sure is a great environment for napping. I love this stuff.
We shot a few pictures at the dam and as we passed through this amazing country. You can see some of them by clicking here