I drove up to Grand Coulee to visit an old friend from college, Kylee. We were engineering students at Cal Poly where she earned her mechanical engineering degree. Now she’s working at the Grand Coulee Dam on temporary assignment through the end of the year. In addition to giving me a tour of the dam, we also ventured off into the surrounding wasteland for a hike near Lake Lenore.
The landscape of Northeastern Washington is dry, hot and barren, but strikingly beautiful as well. The land was created by fire and shaped by water over millions of years:
- 40 to 60 million years ago: Granite bedrock formed deep in the Earth’s crust, eventually being uplifted to form small mountains and an inland sea.
- 10 to 18 million years Ago: The Grand Ronde Rift experienced a series of volcanic eruptions which filled the inland sea with basaltic lava.
- 2.5 million years ago: The Pleistocene glaciation covered much of North America with ice sheets, which blocked the Columbia River causing it to divert to the south, creating a channel which would eventually become The Grand Coulee.
- 18,000 years ago: Glacial ice advanced to block the Clark Fork River drainage in present day Idaho, creating a massive lake which covered much of Montana. The natural ice dam failed, releasing roughly 500 cubic miles of water in 48 hours. This process is thought to have occurred periodically resulting in a cataclysmic event that we now know as the Missoula Floods.