Dam still a formidable sight
Half the people I’ve met visiting Grand Coulee say they came to see the dam.
We tourists are known for driving hundreds of miles to look at really big things and Grand Coulee Dam is huge. It’s the largest concrete dam in North America, made of 12 million cubic yards of concrete – enough to build a 6-foot-wide sidewalk around the equator.
Some people come to the Grand Coulee region because of a personal connection: their grandfather helped build the dam, their aging mother longed to see the desert landscape she grew up in.
Whatever the motivation to journey here, Grand Coulee’s pleasant, warm nights are a good excuse for staying out late to enjoy an evening stroll over the river and the amusement of laser lights thrown against a giant dam.
Grand Coulee Dam sits out in what seems like the middle of nowhere. The mountaintops around it are empty of trees and houses. Desert sagebrush spreads across the rocky, dry slopes.
The dam is the reason Grand Coulee and other small towns with names like Electric City and Coulee Dam exist. The country was in the midst of the Depression when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the funds to begin Grand Coulee Dam. These tiny villages sprang up in the mid-1930s populated by engineers and laborers who built the dam to irrigate dry land. The project was completed in the early 1940s and another powerhouse was added later.
No matter where you stand politically or environmentally on the dam issue, you have to admit Grand Coulee Dam is incredible. For humans to have moved the earth around, diverted a great river – it’s a gutsy thing to even try, especially in the 1930s.
The Visitors Arrival Center at Grand Coulee Dam is located on Highway 155 and features exhibits about the project’s history and construction. When the skies darken, white water will roar down the incline of the dam to serve as a backdrop for a colorful laser light show. Until then, we needed to eat supper.
Food establishments are few, but together Grand Coulee and the neighboring communities offer familiar cuisine of today’s American town: burgers, pizza, Mexican and Chinese. According to a young hotel clerk, the Mexican restaurant La Presa (“The Dam”) is one of the nicest restaurants in Grand Coulee and the place you’d probably take a prom date.
La Presa’s menu had the expected beans and enchiladas, but a long list of seafood dishes sounded good to me. John and I split an order of Chimichanga de Jaiba, a mixture of shrimp, crab, scallops, sautéed vegetables and spices. I realized we were far from a fresh seafood market, but this dish was a nice break from the beef tacos and beans we normally order at Mexican restaurants. We returned to the Grand Coulee Motel and Center Lodge to eat in our room’s tidy kitchenette with our dog Kah-less.
To work off some calories we walked Kah-less up and down dusty roads that traverse the desert and lead to coves on Lake Roosevelt and small Crescent Bay Lake, perfect spots for sitting and fishing from shore (if a dog isn’t splashing and scaring the fish).
The desert can seem desolate at times, especially when the sun is tremendously hot and oppressive, yet coyotes, deer, quail, squirrels and marmots make their home in the low-growing grasses and brush.
Earlier that morning, across from our hotel, we had spotted desert mariposa tulips with pale lavender petals scattered throughout the faded green and brown landscape. Light-orange desert globemallow flowers also were among the arid vegetation and will spread open their petals in the July sun.
At dusk, people lined up lawn chairs on the main viewing deck outside the visitors’ center at Grand Coulee Dam as they waited for the 35-minute laser light presentation to begin. There are several viewpoints around the dam.
The show schedule varies with the sunset: Memorial Day weekend through July, 10 p.m.; August, 9:30 p.m.; and September, 8:30 p.m. Admission is free; however, a state parks $5 day-use fee applies at Crown Point Vista beginning this summer. (Parks officials said those who stop for a moment to stretch will likely escape the charge, which is on an honor system.)
I admit I used to be a little jealous when older teenagers I knew in the ‘80s talked about the weekend Pink Floyd laser show, but to be honest, I don’t like laser light shows in general. However, lasers bouncing off a huge sheet of cascading water on one of the largest dams in the world is, well, pretty cool. A lot of other people thought so, too.
The show’s audio boomed from speakers located at select viewpoints; you also can hear it by tuning the car radio to 90.1 FM. The narrative simplifies and squishes down the history of the area, the reasons and benefits of the nation’s biggest hydro project and the changes that occurred to the landscape and the bands of Native Americans who lived here first.
Before the show ended, John drove us down and across the Columbia River to get a different, maybe better view of the lights. On a stretch of green lawn people sat facing the dam. On a bench rested a life-size statue of folk singer Woody Guthrie strumming his guitar and singing with a girl and boy. Guthrie was hired by the federal government to pen some public relations tunes, such as “Roll On Columbia,” about harnessing the power of the river as it rolls on.
We followed a sidewalk past a large bucket used to lift and pour concrete to build the dam. The walkway continued on to the bridge we had just crossed in the car. On one side of the bridge, interpretive panels covered the dam’s construction progress over the years. We returned the next morning to look at old photos on these panels and compare them to the current dam in the distance.
Interpretive panels on the other side of the bridge described the geologic changes left by ice and floods of an ancient time. Haystack-shaped boulders deposited long ago still rest in dry fields and hills around Grand Coulee. I saw a few and pointed them out to John and Kah-less as we stood on the bridge.
Passing cars and RVs made the bridge rumble beneath our feet. Kah-less didn’t like it. He also was frustrated by the fact that we could see water below us, but couldn’t get to it. He pulled on his leash toward the car.
About a half mile from the town of Grand Coulee we stopped at North Dam Park along Banks Lake. There, enclosed in a chain-link fence, is an assortment of various spinning metal and wooden figures known as the Gehrke Windmill Garden.
It may not be as high-tech as a laser light show, yet I’m sure the smiles created by this whimsical folk art are just as bright.