The Amazing Grand Coulee Dam

Fathers Day, 2014

Even though our daughters are thousands of miles away, it was a good Father’s Day.  We started off with a nice breakfast at the Airstream rally in Sacajawea  State Park.

Breakfast with fellow "Streamers"

Best of all, we got to explore new roads and see some truly spectacular things—the upper Columbia River basin and the Grand Coulee Dam.  We became very interested in the dam after listening to the book The Boys on The Boat, which was all about the UW rowing team preparing for the 1936 Munich Olympics during the Great Depression.  To pay for tuition, two of the team members spent a summer suspended from ropes high above the river jack hammering away at the granite cliffs.

The approach to the dam is like driving the Columbia Gorge, only on a small windy road with different formations, but spectacular just the same.

Along the way to Grand Coulee

We stayed in Steamboat Rock State Park, a very delightful surprise, and we wish we could have spent a couple more days for hiking and biking.

Steamboat Rock State Pa4k

Lush green campground

The Grand Coulee is reputed to be the largest concrete structure in the world.  Nearly a mile wide and 46 stories high, there is enough concrete in it to complete two four-foot sidewalks around the world two times.  Unlike the Boulder Dam on the Colorado River, it’s not much to look at because so much of it is under water.  What makes it impressive are its statistics, engineering breakthroughs at that time, and the sheer amount of effort it took to complete it.  Just one of the new generators, for example, processes more water than the entire Colorado River at the Boulder Dam does in a day—and there are eight of them, plus several smaller ones!

The Grand Coulee Dam from Vista Point

The Grand Coulee Dam fills you with pride about American ingenuity and what we are capable of doing.  However, it is also a depressing reminder of our current lack of vision, political will, and taxpayer unwillingness to invest in the future because “it is a government project.”  Never mind the fact that it helped us win WWII with the electricity for aluminum aircraft, the shipyards, and plutonium production.  It is now a hugely profitable economic engine for Washington that provides so much agricultural bounty, including our favorite, wine grapes.  Some of the power is shipped all the way to San Diego, but a good amount of that is lost during transmission.

 We highly recommend a visit to the visitor center (except for the annoying fake jackhammer that kids play with constantly, which I would have done if I had seen it at a young age).  We also recommend the guided tour.  After a security screening stricter than at airports, we got to go below the surface of the water, see a few generators, and ride across the top of the dam in a van, under the watchful eye of a cop in a bullet-proof vest toting an assault rifle shadowing us.

We left the place with two familiar feelings that we get when we visit impressive places like this:  1) we stand on really broad shoulders of giants that preceded us, and 2) we enjoy the shade of trees planted by someone who never knew us.

Next stop—Lake Chelan and the North Cascades National Park.