Washington - Day 24 - Grand Coulee Dam, to Newport

Newport/Little Diamond Lake KOA, Newport

Friday, 24 June 2022

today's route

We were set to cover over 200 miles today, and even Google said it'd take more than 4 hours to do it, so I decided to get on the road early.  It helps that sunrise is at 5:00 these days, so it was well beyond full daylight at 6:45 when we got on the road.

We stopped in Ephrata to pick up some groceries and then went a few miles farther to Soap Lake, the name of both the town and the body of water.  These signs I found there explain how Soap Lake got its name and a bit of its history.

It sets a record, they say.

And it really does look and feel soapy (I tried it).

farther along the lake

I took that first photo partly for the suds and partly so I could look the birds up later.  Actually, I didn't look closely enough at the gulls to be able to say anything except they're one of the kinds with black wingtips.  I was looking at the shorebirds, trying to memorize them.  Of course my memory didn't last as long as the photo, but it was good enough for me to be able to identify them.

I'm sure about the Black-necked Stilts, the black and white ones.  And if the one with the rusty color on the head looked taller, I'd be sure it was an American Avocet - they're 4" taller than the Stilts.  But it looks just like its picture and nothing else does, and it's supposed to be here, so I guess that's it.

Black-necked Stilt - 14" tall

American Avocet - 18" tall

Near the end of the lake, I happened on what I thought was a large statue, that turned out to be a sundial.

"Calling the Healing Waters"
The world's first human figure sundial,
according to the sign.

unusual pose, with one of his legs awkwardly behind him

It turned out that the outstretched wing was the arm of the sundial, with the times marked around the edge of that platform with the seats.

There was an inscription nearby that was such a combination of light and shadow it's hard to read, but without the accidental misspellings, here's what it said:

"Since its creation, Soap Lake has brought healing and therapeutic well-being to its inhabitants. . . . This sculpture evokes the divinity, heritage and dreams of the people whose hearts are in residence.  The sundial is set to solar time." 

It was a gift of the Soap Lake Garden Club and other donors.  

The road from there followed the lake, which is about 2 miles long, and one of several lakes - some quite large - that I drove along.  And I saw a lot of fishing from the shore so there's clearly a lot of life there.

Near Coulee City, I saw a good-sized flock of White Pelicans.  The map of their range in the bird book told me they don't get any farther north in Washington than this, so I guess I got lucky.

A sign at Coulee City told me it was the Home of the Annual Last Stand Rodeo, which will be held for the 70th time over Memorial Day weekend - in other words, I just missed it.

Among the lakes I saw was Banks Lake, a long (27 miles) stretch of blue-green water with tall cliffs on both sides.  The internet told me it was formed by the Missoula Floods during the Pleistocene Epoch, but I learned later that it's fed by water from the Grand Coulee Dam.

I passed the small town of Electric City, so named because of its proximity to the massive power source of the dam.

At the town of Grand Coulee, I found a place I remembered from a quick visit I'd made to this part of the state many years ago.  The Gehrke Windmill Garden was a little blurb I found in the AAA travel guide and I'd stopped just to see.  And here it was still, looking just like itself.

At first, all you can see is a riot - of color and motion and sound.  And then it sorts itself out into dozens of oddball windmills perched above dozens of planters of flowers.

I took a video, hoping you could hear the sound of the creaking of all these old odd parts, but the wind was blowing so strong it's about all I can hear.  Still, it's fun to watch.

In case you're wondering where this all came from, here's the informational sheet posted at the garden.

In 2016, the Gehrke Windmill Garden was added to the Washington Heritage List of Historic Places.

I saw a display at a nearby park that had some information about Grand Coulee Dam that helped explain the geographic confusion I'd been feeling.

So coming from south to north was what confused me.  Lake Franklin D. Roosevelt (in the north) is formed out of the Columbia River which is held back by the dam.  Water flows through the dam into Banks Lake (in the south), and from there into several other lakes.  But the Columbia River itself takes a turn to the northwest and runs back over to where I found it last week at Pateros and Chelan and especially Wenatchee and points south.  It finally flows through the Tri-cities area, where I'll be later this month, and then becomes half the border between Washington and Oregon, flowing at last into the Pacific Ocean.

But I still have to get to the dam which, from the windmill garden, was less than 3 miles farther on.

What I first came to was the most impressive part of anything the visitor center could show me.

Did you notice all those trees that were more than knee-deep in water?  Which would normally tell me there's more water coming through than usual.  I don't know what it means at a dam.

Okay, the problem I had here was that to me, the high side of this dam was on the downstream side near Banks Lake, which would mean Lake Roosevelt was on the lower part of this dramatic video.  Even I know you can't have water from below pouring in such quantities uphill to a higher level.  

So I did a lot of research and had a hard time finding anyone that wanted to explain it to me.  But apparently what happened was the road must have crossed Banks Lake when I wasn't paying attention, and then turning so that it was coming toward the dam not from south to north as I'd thought (which would put the north - Lk. Roosevelt - on the lower side), but still coming from the south, so Lake Roosevelt would be on the uphill side and that lower part is Banks Lake.  Look, I'm doing the best I can and nobody wants to give me a clear answer that fits the facts I could see.  If anybody finds a website that explains what happened to my sense of direction, please let me know.

There were a lot of displays on various dam-related topics in the visitor center.  I'll include a few of them here.

One of those signs mentioned the amount of concrete in the dam in cubic yards - and the visitor center thoughtfully provided a visual aid for that.

The sign says: "This is a cubic yard.
Grand Coulee Dam contains approximately
12 million cubic yards of concrete."

And this exhibit explains why there's so much concrete in it:

FDR visited the dam site twice, once in 1934 after construction had started but before the river was diverted, and again 3 years later when the foundation was nearly complete.  Eleanor is supposed to have commented, "It was a good salesman who sold this to Franklin."

Now, the dam serves a variety of purposes, and here are some exhibits about those.

This is the display -
some parts are enlarged below.

Then there was this one about the geology of the site.

And here's how all that geology got formed:

Fire, ice and water.
(Sounds like an old rock band.)

The photo about ICE didn't come out but it read as follows:

"Then the glaciers came, advancing from great ice fields in the north.  Lobes of ice extended across rivers, creating blockages.  Massive lakes formed behind the ice dams, covering much of today's Montana."

One of the reasons FDR supported the program (I'm guessing) is that it gave jobs to a large number of men who otherwise might not have had them.

Once the dam was done, they discovered an oopsie: the Columbia River, that they'd so ruthlessly commandeered, had supported an enormous salmon run, but the dam - and those 800,000 gallons of water per second that flowed through it - put a quick end to that historic event.

And it turned out that the salmon weren't the only casualty.

And for a final summary:

I'd come down a steep hill to get to the dam's visitor center, and once I climbed back up again and turned onto the road heading east, I came to another steep hill that kept climbing for 11 miles.

At Wilbur, pop. 2,175 they say, I saw a small herd of cows with seriously long hair.  They looked like those old shag carpets, only brown instead of lime green.

The town of Creston said it was Home of the Wildcats.  With a recent population of 238, I'm guessing the local teams are well-supported, because of being the only game in town (so to speak).

I passed large fields of grain - most already cut but not yet gathered - and other crops.

Davenport hosts the Pioneer Days the 3rd weekend in July.  It's the county seat and has more than 1,700 residents, and I'm sure the celebration will be a lot of fun.

From here I started seeing large fields of yellow - canola?

The town of Reardon (652 residents) celebrated Mule Days earlier this month.  Among other attractions they have a parade, a barbecue, a car show, and a poker ride - which seems to consist of contestants riding a mule to designated stops where they'll draw a card that's recorded on their game sheet, and the best game sheet hand at the end of the ride is the Winner!  The whole thing sounds like a hoot to me.

There's nothing like a small town to make the most of its celebrations.  Everywhere.

Not far from Spokane is Fairchild Air Force Base.  Established in 1942 as the Spokane Army Air Depot, it now hosts the 92nd Air Refueling Wing, a process that has always seemed wildly dangerous to me.

Then on to Spokane - no sign but I guessed.  Spokane (pronounced spoke-ANN) is the 2nd largest city in the state, with about a third the population of Seattle.  It seems to have a fair number of homeless folks, too, based on the number of tents I saw in a park.

I saw the Thomas Stephen "Tom" Foley Memorial Highway and thought that was the least they could do for the guy.  I remember him because I was lobbying while he was still in office.  He was a Democrat that served in the US House for 30 years, the last 6 as Speaker of the House.  In 1995, he was knocked out of office (the first time a Speaker had lost a reelection since 1862) by a forgettable Republican because his district, which had become increasingly conservative, were angry about him opposing term limits (though most people call them "elections").  While he was Speaker, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Brady handgun bill, and NAFTA, among many others.  He clearly knew how to make Congress work, and I think we need him back again.

I passed a business named Sweeto Burrito.  Apparently their food isn't sweet - the founder was just looking for a catchy name.

I passed several signs for "Re-elect Larry Haskell County Prosecutor."  He was one of my study partners in law school and I knew he'd been working in the prosecutor's office out here but hadn't realized that he himself was now in charge.  

A little research told me he was having trouble in this election for two related reasons: one was his wife having made some seriously ugly comments (at a Trump rally) to a Black woman which were documented; two was that minority residents in the county were upset about what they saw as unequal administration of justice by the prosecutor's office.  Apparently Larry had been downplaying his wife's comments, saying they were her First Amendment right but had nothing to do with him.  But he'd finally had to make a public statement that not only were the comments ugly and reprehensible and didn't reflect his own views, but they also didn't reflect the views of his staff and he wanted to make it clear that he believed his staff was always working to do their jobs fairly.  I'm sure he believes that.

But today wasn't the day for sightseeing in Spokane and we pressed on northward, quickly finding ourselves back in the pine trees - a surprise after all the desert country we've been driving through.  

We passed through the Kalispel Indian Reservation and made it to the campground 7 hours after we got on the road this morning.  We didn't actually get settled for nearly 2 hours after that, though, because I needed to refill with propane and dump my tanks and walk Dexter and unpack all the stuff that usually sits out on the counter and table but I stow when we're driving.  I was pretty pooped by then.