Sunday, June 1, 2014

The Grand Coulee Dam Plus

Thursday, Friday and Saturday
Spring Canyon is a National Reclamation Service campground, it has no hookups, but is a beautiful site, next to the Roosevelt Lake, from there you can see across the lake to the Grand Coulee Dam. Having driven across the Scablands (like our moorlands) we started to appreciate the scale of the Grand Coulee Project. The dam holds back water for Lake Roosevelt which is 151 miles long, that is like a lake that stetches from London to Sheffield! It is actually four times the size of the Hoover Dam across the Colorado near Las Vegas. It just reinforces to us how big the Columbia River Basin is.
We stayed on Spring Canyon Camground for three nights and really enjoyed just relaxing in the sunshine, even more when we were only paying $5 a night for the site. It was sunny and getting warmer by the day however there is plenty of pleasant shade and we stayed cool. We have seen lots of different birds here: Orioles, King Bird, California Quail and the inevitable Robin.
On Friday evening we took a ride to Steamboat SP, not really expecting much, but were once more staggered by the variety and scale of the scenery. Steamboat Rock is an island in another reservoir. This lake is only 25 miles long, but is bounded by a huge cliff face about 600 ft high and running the whole length of the lake. We only drove down about 5 miles of it, before turning back in time to watch the Laser Display which is projected onto the face of the Grand Coulee Dam, depicting the story of the dam and its surroundings.
 

1 comment:

  1. Oh I want to come back!! I think I'm going to stop reading your blogs - makes me so homesick. Glad you got to see the laser show and the birds are great.

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