Day 62, Tuesday, August 16 (my birthday)

One thing I’d noticed yesterday as I was driving along Banks Lake is that it has damn at both ends. To me this seems very strange. Putting a damn in a river allows you to back up water behind it, but for there to be a dam at both ends of a lake means that the water has to be pumped into the lake. I figured I had to have missed something last night, but it turns out I was absolutely correct. Banks Lake was created at the same time Grand Coulee Dam was created. The purpose of Banks Lake is to feed the hundreds and hundreds of miles of irrigation canals needed to keep central Washington from being a desert. Washington’s rolling plains have an interesting combination of having wonderfully rich soil, but not enough water to make it arable. Enter Grand Coulee Dam and Banks Lake. Several of the hydroelectric turbines in the dam are actually used to pump water from the Columbia River up hundreds of feet over a ridge to fill Banks Lake. The amount of power needed to lift that amount of water must be staggering, but then again the Grand Coulee Dam is the largest dam in the US and one of the largest in the world. Electric power to lift the water isn’t exactly lacking.
I took a tour of the dam this morning and found everything about the dam to be incomprehensibly big. While Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake created by the dam isn’t nearly as big as Lake Mead, created by the Hoover Dam, the amount of water flowing through the Columbia River significantly dwarfs the amount in the Colorado River.
Grand Coulee dam was built in two stages. In the initial stage, the dam was created as a gravity dam (the weight of the concrete holds back the water rather than the shape of the dam as is the case with the Hoover Dam) straight across the river. At that point water used to come over the spillway of the dam 20 feet deep. But then demands for electricity increased and it was determined and another section of dam was needed. The second section, built at an angle to the first section holds 6 of the worlds largest hydro electric turbines. Here’s kicker…each of these turbines passes more water than the entire Colorado River! After construction of this section, called the 3rd Power House, all the water that had originally flowed over the spillway was diverted through the turbines and the spillway now stands dry.
Prior to the occurrences on 9/11, tourists used to be able to drive their cars across the top of the dam. After the security issues created by 9/11 tourists are now restricted to a guided tour of the 3rd Powerhouse. That tour was still enough to leave me awestruck by the enormity of the project. Each of the 6 turbines I mentioned in the previous paragraph is over 80 feet in diameter and the entire building shakes with the force of the water cursing through them. It’s truly a sight everybody ought to see. I realize construction of the dam caused great problems with migratory fish and with the tribes of Native Americans both displaced by the lake and whose source of food, the fish was eliminated by the damn but I’m still left in awe!
Leaving Grand Coulee Dam this at about noon today, I headed East across the Washington, and Idaho and into Montana in order to make it to Glacier by this evening. Unfortunately, the weather radio is predicting thunderstorms all day tomorrow so I’ve chosen to stay at a KOA just outside of the park and catch up on my correspondence and this website for a day or two while the rains clear.