Ten thousand years ago, or there about, a finger of the Canadian ice shield that dammed the Clark Fork River near modern-day Missoula, Montana failed catastrophically, and in the space of 48 hours or so, 500 cubic miles of water spilled out from Glacial Lake Missoula over Eastern Washington and created a landscape unique on the planet.
The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington are a region rife with geological and historical significance. After spending a week in this beautiful, but lightly-traveled part of the country, I was inspired to jot some reflections down. Please feel free to join me in a ramble through the coulees and fields of this corner of our nation.
The occasion was my father in law's 80th birthday. Born in 1930, he would be nine before the end of the Great Depression, and his lifetime would see a dramatic change in the geography the Inland Northwest. One of the most significant changes being the addition of the Grand Coulee Dam.
Many of us know about the Grand Coulee Dam from the songs of Woody Guthrie--Hired at the end of the depression by the Bonneville Power Administration to tout the benefits of the cheap hydroelectric power they were developing, he naturally stressed electricity in his songs he wrote in his month in the northwest.
(Short documentary on Woody Guthrie and the BPA)
Roll on, Columbia, roll on, roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.
But the Grand Coulee Dam was not primarily intended, at least originally, for power generation: Its sheer size was necessitated for another need: Irrigation.
And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories and water the land
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
As we drove to the Grand Coulee area, we played Woody's songs on the car stereo, and it helped to somehow connect the recent history of the land we were driving through with the landscape that rushed passed. My six-year-old, who somehow picked up that China's Three Gorges Dam was bigger than the Grand Coulee, delighted in pointing out that Woody was wrong, and it was no longer the "mightiest thing ever built by a man".
But mighty it is, nonetheless. It lifts the Columbia River 380 feet in order to make it possible to pump irrigation water another 280 vertical feet into a formerly dry portion of the Grand Coulee south of the dam to feed man-made Banks Lake as the main irrigation reservoir of the Columbia Basin Project A much lower dam would have been sufficient for simple power generation, but the Bureau of Reclamation had a rich target in mind: The fertile, but dry loess soils of the Columbia Plateau.
Today, some 630,000 acres of land (about 60% of the full capacity of the system) are irrigated by the system fed primarily by this dam--the largest water reclamation project in the United States.
This irrigation project has made formerly non-arable lands some of the most fertile farmlands in the US. Eastern Washington is a major producer of wheat, potatoes, tree fruits (apples, cherries and pears predominantly), Hops, wine grapes, hay, sweet corn, mint, asparagus, lentils and peas, to name a few. The irrigation of this land enabled entire communities to flourish where few lived before, and provided a huge boost to the regional economy--today, total farm earnings in Douglas, Franklin, Adam, Pierce and Benton counties amounts to almost $900m, and much of this is economic activity is directly enabled by the Columbia Basin Project. But there are many other benefits, also.
From Wiki:
According to the federal Bureau of Reclamation the yearly value of the Columbia Basin Project is $630 million in irrigated crops, $950 million in power production, $20 million in flood damage prevention, and $50 million in recreation.
When the first phase of the Grand Coulee dam was completed in 1942, America had just entered WWII, and electric power became a much more significant benefit of the Dam. The war effort required power for the construction of war material, and Washington State was the site of aviation giant, Boeing, whose B-17s and B-29's pressed the attack against the Axis powers. This manufacturing also required the power-intensive production of aluminum--the first major industrial client for the dam's electricity. Construction of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the Federal site where the plutonium for the Trinity site nuclear test and the Nagasaki atomic bomb was refined, also depended on the abundant NW hydroelectric power.
And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories for ol' Uncle Sam
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
This construction project truly changed the face of this corner of the nation.
Bootstraps
I promised you bootstraps--
Well, to get a better perspective on the terrain of this dramatic area, my wife and son and I all tightened up said bootstraps and drove to Steamboat Rock State Park, one of Washington State's stellar state parks, and hiked our way, 700 plus feet, to the top of the park's namesake rock--A basalt butte that was carved by the ice age megafloods, as the waters stripped away huge portions of a previous flood--Lava flows that formed the vast Columbia Plateau about 10-15 million years ago, covering the granitic rocks of the previous landscape where once, among other things, rhinos roamed in abundance.
(aerial view of the rock)
Up there, there is beauty on small and grand scales:
But as grand as it all is, all you are looking at is one small portion of one finger of the landscape carved by the ice-age floods--a small stretch of the Grand Coulee itself that starts near the Dam site and stretches down past Dry Falls to Soap lake, about 60 miles in all.
These floods, that essentially made the Columbia Basin Project possible by providing a convenient reservoir site in the dry Grand Coulee, also created a great irony by stripping much of the loess soils in the area, and depositing them in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley, and, of course, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Talk about 'redistribution of wealth'!
But another thing was required to make this project possible, and it had nothing to do with geology, and everything to do with community.
Boostraps, Revisited
For years, the idea of a grand Columbia Basin irrigation project had been debated, with no progress. As early as 1914, the concept was pitched and debated, and proponents soon broke into two camps: those favoring a high Dam at Grand Coulee, and those (driven by private interests in urban Spokane) who favored a low dam off of the Pend-Oreille river and a series of ditches. It wasn't until Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 that the logjam was broken. Seizing the opportunity to build needed infrastructure and to put Depression-idled men back to work, he approved plans for a federal project to build the dam.
Grand Coulee Dam went into operation in 1941, and its power quickly was heralded as a huge success in helping the war effort and, of course, soon provided the irrigation it was designed for. Its success stands as a monument to the power of collective, community action. It required a belief in the power of groups of people to join together for common benefit, and the bringing to bear the power of the appropriately sized community, in this case, the entire United States. At the site's dedication in 1950, bottles of water from all 48 states, Alaska and Hawaii, were poured into the reservoir to represent the contribution to the project from all of the people of this nation.
Building the Grand Coulee Dam was one part of a great nation lifting itself up by its own bootstraps to pull itself out of the Depression, and to bring prosperity to an entire region.
Was it perfect? Of course not. The dam decimated native salmon stocks and the original ideal of thousands of small-holder farms flourishing on the Columbia Plateau was never realized, as corporate agribusiness became the main beneficiary of the irrigation water. It also flooded out many historical communities, and essentially ended the traditional life for the native people in the upper Columbia.
It would still be many years before Native Americans would be considered as full partners in the national community
It's there on your banks that we fought many a fight
Sheridan's boys in the blockhouse that night
They saw us in death but never in flight
So roll on Columbia, roll on
Remember the trial when the battle was won?
The wild Indian warriors to the tall timber run
We hung every Indian with smoke in his gun
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
But with all its flaws, the Dam stands as a testament to a time, not so long ago, that seems in many ways so different now. A time when the populist, liberal interest groups were rural in nature, and the nation, and its smaller communities, believed in collective action as a way to benefit all. Where "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" could apply to communities, not just individuals.
A quick trip down the Columbia bears witness to this. In 1930, spurred on by the populist agricultural Grange organization, Washington State passed its Public Utility District Law, providing a framework for local communities to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and provide needed power and water services.
Short video history of Washington State PUD's
Today, five PUD operated hydroelectric dams stand on the Columbia. And most of Washington's nearly 30 PUD's buy power for their customers from the Federally operated Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power generated from the many federal dams on the Columbia and its tributaries.
(Fish ladder and spillway at Chelan County PUD's Rocky Reach Dam)
This legacy of public hydroelectric power has provided the Northwest corner of our nation with a tradition of low-carbon, low cost, renewable energy, a commodity whose value will only rise in coming years. And, since there are huge technical, environmental and legal hurdles to new dam sites, it has left this corner of the nation with another tradition--Energy conservation. Northwest Utilities, public and private, have been leaders in instituting aggressive conservation programs, realizing early on that the cost of new generation dwarfs the costs of conservation.
The past shapes the future, and the inland Northwest has reaped benefits from ancient catastrophe. And it did it by realizing the value of collective action for the benefit of the public.
What more to say about this great corner of the US? There's plenty more to tell--
J. Harlen Bretz, who fought against scientific orthodoxy to be vindicated in his theory of the megaflood, but couldn't figure out where the water came from?; J.T. Pardee, who identified the source as a massive ice-age lake?; Kaiser Permanente, which started as a field clinic for dam workers?; Comparisons between Grand Coulee and the more photogenic (but much smaller) Hoover Dam? A discussion of the natural ecology of the scablands? A discussion of the energy efficiency future in the Pacific Northwest?; An exploration of Dry Falls, the biggest waterfall known to have ever existed?
Its tough to give it all a fair treatment without simply rambling on and on. So instead, I think I will just end this diary with a few snapshots illustrating the scenic beauty of the legacy of Washington's ice age floods.
And one, for the sheer bliss: