Memories Come Pouring In Water Has Returned To Lakes In Lincoln County

Merlin Jantz was out checking cattle when he saw the backs of carp bulging out of Tule Lake and knew the drought had come.

By his next ride, the fish were bones.

When a 10-mile chain of lakes dried up near here a decade ago, a refuge in southwestern Lincoln County died with them.

Odessa lost its fishing hole. No more trout derbies on Pacific Lake seven miles north of town, no more water-skiing contests or hockey games on local ice. The raft the Evavold brothers sent over Delzer Falls hung on dry rock.

Browns, Tavares, Bonney, Pacific, Walter and Tule lakes disappeared. Ducks, fishermen and picnickers went with them.

“We just didn’t go out there anymore,” said Tom Evavold, an Odessa farmer who grew up at Pacific Lake, 75 miles southwest of Spokane. “It was pretty depressing.”

Until this spring, when the water came back.

Lake Creek started rising in November. By January, locals were driving up Sunday afternoons to witness the lakes refilling. Primed by a wet 1996, the creek swelled from nearly 14 inches of moisture that have fallen since November.

At Pacific Lake, Lakeview Ranch has - for the first time in years - a lake to view. Staff members at the Bureau of Land Management property were working on providing public access when the lake filled in just a few months, then kept rising.

“It’s tough from a management standpoint,” said Ann Aldrich, an area manager for the BLM. “It was gone yesterday, here today. Government is not used to reacting that fast.”

BLM will build a picnic shelter and a boat ramp on the north shore in June - as soon as the shore dries out.

Don Walter, editor and publisher of the Odessa Record, has led a campaign to restock Pacific Lake. In late April, 10,000 catchable trout were released. Another 50,000 are scheduled.

Walter’s father built Lakeview Ranch and his sister’s family, the Evavolds, raised their children and the largest herd of shorthorn cattle in the country at that time. The BLM acquired the ranch in 1991.

“I would like it to see it return to the 1920s and ‘30s when it really was Odessa’s vacation spot,” Walter said.

Visitors are already arriving. For the first time in years, Delzer Falls, owned by John Vazquez, are roaring, falling 60 deafening feet to spray an acre with cool mist and greenery.

Vazquez opened his property to onlookers who crossed the scrub thick with ticks and rattlesnakes for a glimpse. Two helicopters carrying sightseers have flown over. Just beyond, Deep Lake is 2 feet deeper than it’s been in recent memory. The foot bridge to the lake wasn’t a floating bridge when it was built, Vazquez tells visitors. It is now.

“We are so excited,” said former Odessa Mayor Dotty Schauerman. “When the fishing ended up at Pacific Lake, it was so sad for the community.”

“We have so many many memories out there. We used to use that place four or five days a week,” said her husband, Mel.

The question now is: Can it last?

The drought is over. Suspicions that irrigation practices in the area inadvertently drained the lakes’ water supply were never proved.

But residents weren’t waiting for nature alone. Eight-hundred people signed a petition calling for the lakes to be rehydrated after they first went dry. The grass-roots committee that resulted has worked on plans to refill the lakes ever since.

That group, backed by Lincoln County Commissioner Bill Graedel, is looking at ways to rehydrate the entire 30-mile chain of lakes. They want to study piping treated waste-water from the city of Spokane to the headwaters of the creek near Creston.

The committee is seeking money for a feasibility study.

The plan seems a less immediate concern now that the lakes are full of water and Lake Creek Coulee full of life.

The channeled scablands are home to several sensitive species, including Washington’s polemnium, a delicate blue flowering plant related to Jacob’s ladder. Amid the deer, rabbits, mallards, coots and canvasbacks, the country also supports the sage grouse, whose numbers are in steep decline.

“The water is going to help everything, the wildlife, irrigation, everything. It’s just going to improve the environment,” said retiree Don Schuh, who’s been tracking the water flow.

It is difficult country, too, so thick with rattlesnakes that Lakeview Ranch has always had a rattlesnake pole on the porch for flicking them off trails. But it’s smaller size makes this place, where lava and ancient Lake Missoula cut the landscape, more accessible than Grand Coulee.

“I think the Lake Creek Canyon is on a more human scale,” said the BLM’s Aldrich. “It’s hard to climb around on Grand Coulee.”

With the water has come a flood of memories for old-timers. They recall fish so thick you could collect them in gunny sacks. Water-skiers so skilled they skied barefoot. Cliffs and sunsets so beautiful they all felt like millionaires.

Jantz hopes the flow is enough to keep Delzer Falls going until next winter. The last time that happened was in 1948, when icicles hung 50 feet long.

“My dad always used to say, and he was right, that we all take our turn with the drouth, now it’s our turn to get the wet and somebody else gets the drought.”

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