The Grand Coulee is an impressive gorge carved out by ice age floods. It is divided into an upper and lower canyon by dry falls at about the mid point. All of the coulee was dry until the creation of the Grand Coulee Dam. The upper part of the canyon was flooded to create an elaborate irrigation system in the 1930’s. The by product of this is Banks Lake. Day two was in and around the lower canyon which is much drier and is truly a desert.
I got an early start on the day and headed south through the coulee to the Dry Falls Vista roadside to get the lay of the land. Below is Sun Lakes State Park with remnant pothole lakes and interesting rock formations.
In this view you can see Perch Lake and in the middle of the coulee and Umatilla Rock, my next hiking destination just down the road in Sun Lakes State Park.
A long scenic park road brings you to the trailhead for Umatilla Rock right at the south end of that formation. A loop trail starts here.
Umatilla Rock is a maybe two mile basalt wall dividing the floor of the lower Grand Coulee in two. All you would need is a saguaro cactus or two to make you think you’re in Arizona.
The loop takes you by both Perch Lake and Dry Falls Lake.
The trail is beautiful. One of the best I’ve found. It really feels like a desert hike.
The trail winds through basalt rock formations that look like they belong on the moon. I was on the lookout but came across no snakes on the entire hike.
Definitely an interesting geology.
There were a lot of wild flowers along the hike that provided beauty on a smaller and more close up scale.
Here are a couple of photos of them.
It was a nice hike.
The only wildlife I saw was this skinny deer. Oh and the hawk that tried to attack me. If he came back for a third go at me, I think I could have got a great photo.
The loop goes through that notch in the wall. I skipped that part so ended up doing two out and back hikes.
This is that same notch from the other side.
One of the better short hikes I’ve been on in a long time. I imagine it gets awfully hot in the summer.
Another long park road brought me to a bonus surprise. At the end was the access for Deep Lake, the nicest lake in the park. At the small boat ramp after crossing a footbridge and a grove of cottonwoods, a trail follows the shore of a beautiful lake.
This lake seems to be a popular place to kayak. If I get the chance I would love to do so, but it’s almost a three hour haul from my house.
The water was crystal clear and the colors amazing.
It looked like there was a trail on the other side that really climbed above the lake. Maybe a challenge for another day.
My last stop in the Grand Coulee was at the Lake Lenore Caves site. Here is the view across the lake from the trailhead.
The trail up the cliff side featured some elaborate steps.
The “caves” are really just rock overhands carved in to the basalt by ancient flood waters.
Here is the view from inside the largest one I found. The trail continues but it was time to head home.
Instead of wild flowers here, I had to settle for colorful lichens.
So on the return trip I took a new route along State Road 28 through farm country. A side trip brought me to one last surprise.
A waterfall in the middle of nowhere. No one else was here and they had a nice little park on the lake too.
The lake the falls drops into looked amazing with clear cool water. Numerous signs prohibited entering the water that looked so inviting.
An explanation could be found in one of the most sobering memorials I’ve seen. In 1978 I was a seventeen year old boy.
It was a beautiful place. Summer Falls as it is called, is part of the path used to move water from the Grand Coulee Dam to Moses Lake and all of the irrigated farmland around it. I imagine the site originally had a small seasonal water fall before it was incorporated in to the project.
The morning started with sunrise at Steamboat Rock at 5:00 AM. Twelve hours after leaving Summer Falls a drive through more farmland ended when I returned to metro Spokane. The Grand Coulee is an amazing place to explore and a great place for my first of hopefully many post retirement trips.
