Some years ago in my USAF life I spent several short stays at Fairchild AFB in Spokane WA! During one of those trips I had some time off and myself and coworker drove west. I remembered two significant things from that day trip – Grand Cooley Dam and a magnificent 1,000 ft. deep gorge that was very wide! Since we have been out west I have been looking for that gorge. My coworker, Lenore, who we spent last Thanksgiving with doesn't remember the gorge! BJ is beginning to think I am crazy – so what's new!
At any rate while at Fairchild AFB on this trip BJ and I took a day trip out to Grand Coulee Dam and I kept asking around and finally found Dry Falls! It was just as magnificent and they had expanded the roadside pull-off from just a spot for 3 or 4 cars max to a small State park with a visitors center and educational displays around the edge of the parking lot looking down into the gorge. And, the geological history behind this gorge is really interesting.
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| Dry Falls across the center of the pic. Imagine a wall of water 3 times as high as Nigrara Falls and 3 miles wide rushing over it at 65+ mph! |
The first picture is from the parking lot looking across the 900 ft. gorge to the Dry Falls. During the last several thousand years of the last glaciation of the North American continent a large ice dam would form periodically across a valley near Missoula MT. This ice damn was a thousand feet high and Lake Missoula formed behind it. The lake had half as much water as in Lake Michigan! Eventually the water eroded the ice dam and when it gave way the water rushed toward the Pacific scouring the land as it went. Another smaller, but still large dam on the Upper Columbia River Basin sometimes was also a factor that increased the water flow.
The gorges formed by these massive floods are called Coulees and Grand Coulee is the largest of them all. Thus the name of the dam built across the Grand Coulee. Debris included boulders as big as houses and anything else in its path! Including soil. When it got to the mouth of the Columbia River, mountains on each side of the mouth forced water to back up in the valleys behind the mountains! When the flow slowed, a lot of the sediment dropped out. In the case of the Willamette Valley running north-south from Portland to Eugene the deposited soil created a rich, fertile valley that today is a cornucopia of produce!
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| Banks Lake, the irrigation reservoir |
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| Grand Coulee dam |
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| This was the addition that doubled its elec generation capacity, added in 70's |
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| Us waiting for the light show! |
In the evening they had a laser light show at 10 PM. They projected multicolored line drawings on the white water flow of the dam and gave you the history of the Columbia River Basin from ancient times to today. We had seen/read most of the history in the Visitors Center and other displays so it was not that interesting to us, but if Reagan and Addison were with us that would be different!
Always at home no matter where we are!
