Grand Coulee Dam WA

One of the stops on our list was the Grand Coulee dam on the Columbia River. Neither of us had ever seen it before and we were so close…

 

We followed this couple in their roadster until they turned around. Wonder if it was the steep climb up the mountain or if they were just at the end of their planned outing.

This was an impressive cut in the rock. It was obvious as we drove up to it that the roadway was cut right through the edge of the mountain. We stopped and looked around a bit and realized that cutting through really was the only option. There simply was no way to skirt the outcropping.

The view from the overlook just before the cut through the rock.

A lone sentinel.

The Columbia River gorge is beautiful! If it weren’t for that little thing called winter…

A close-up of the cut through the rock.

One of the signs we were getting close to the dam was the increasing number of power lines. The mountain ridge was covered in high voltage lines criss crossing the landscape.

The town of Coulee was a bit of an oasis in an otherwise pretty barren landscape.

One of the narrower bridges we’ve crossed in the RV. Fortunately, we managed to time it when there were no large vehicles coming the other way.

The power lines were very big!!

That’s a lot of concrete! We often wonder if it’s even possible anymore to build something as massive as the Grand Coulee dam. Between the increasing regulatory burdens and the vastly increased construction costs (8,000 workers on the GC dam received an average of $0.80/hr) contrasted with improved technology, it’s hard to know. Besides the dam, 4 bridges and worker housing were also part of the project. Overall, the construction took 9 years to build the original dam.

Lots of dam sites in this part of the country. So lots of power generation capacity.

One interesting side note is that the 3rd powerhouse, the one on the far left, was built 30 years after the dam was completed (also taking about 9 years) and it generates about 60% of the total power output of the dam. Technology had improved that much in a short time. At about 7,000 megawatts, the Grand Coulee dam is the largest power producer in the country.

Upstream of the dam, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt lake was calm and placid..

Not a very crowded day. Of course, it was late in the season.

 

We found a little out of the way campground at Curlew Lake.

Surprisingly, most of the small campground was either full or reserved. But they had an area set aside called “Random,” for either tents or no-hookup RV’s. Since we’ve rarely had hook-ups anywhere we’ve been, that worked perfectly. The woman working at the camp office also took pity on us and gave us the senior discount even though it was state not national park, probably because we were OK with the Random area.

This might be the most interesting boat we’ve seen in a long time. It was a homebuilt pontoon boat with large corrugated pipes as the pontoons. A plywood platform covered with a backyard screen awning sat across the corrugated pipes. The driver steered by leaning down and pushing the outboard then sitting back up to see how much effect each shove of the outboard had. Needless to say, the trailer was also homemade. It was all excellent craftsmanship, just odd.

 

But if not…