The largest waterfall in the world spans an arid region devoid of all but lichens and the hardiest shrubs. Over three and a half miles long and four hundred feet high, it is roughly three times the size of New York’s Niagara Falls. So why isn’t it a top travel destination? Well, perhaps because the water that plunged down the falls dried up more than 10,000 years ago.
[Wikipedia Commons]
My family and I first visited here while taking a detour on a road trip across Washington State from the Seattle airport to the northeastern town of Northport. The falls are located in central Washington off Highway 2. From Coulee City, we skirted the lower end of Banks Lake, a reservoir created as part of the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, then turned left onto Route 17 for a mile or so. A parking lot and visitor center sit at the edge of a wide, deep trough known as the Grand Coulee. Brown basalt table-top cliffs descend in layers for hundreds of feet, encircling an amoeba-shaped collection of lakes that seem misplaced in the dry landscape. The cliffs on the upper end fan out for more than three and a half miles in gigantic scallops. They are the Dry Falls.
Here’s how it happened:
Deep Lake
In a colder and distant past, perhaps some 15,000 years ago, a lip of the southern edge of the continental ice sheet dammed the Clark Fork River, forming the 200-mile-long Glacial Missoula Lake. When water from the lake breeched the dam, torrents of water hundreds of feet high and moving at the speed of a car on a highway flooded the region, scouring a network of channels along the way. [See more about that in my previous post.] When the water reached cliffs near Soap Lake, off Interstate 90 north of Moses Lake, it plunged over them, forming a waterfall on an immense scale. The cliffs eroded in the face of such a battering of water, ice, rock, and other debris. At the end of the Ice Age, they had eroded some fifteen miles upriver, to the site of the present-day Dry Falls.
Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park:
If you have trouble imaging the immensity of the water that once descended the Dry Falls, stop at the visitor center next to the parking lot. There you’ll find all sorts of maps, books, and scale models, and a documentary film that recreates the time of the Ice Age Floods.
Deep Lake
The Dry Falls are the main attraction of the lovely Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park, but once there you should also tour the rest of the park. Well paved roads lead to several plunge pools formed as a result of the floods, a swimming area and boat launch on the larger Park Lake, several trails that wind through sage vegetation to cliff-side panoramas, an improbable nine-hole golf course, and Deep Lake. This has become one of my favorite kayaking destinations. The water is surrounded by table-top cliffs exposing adjoining basalt pillars, shallow caves, and gravel slides. The site has a comfortable put-in area, shaded picnic tables, and paths bordering sections of the lake. Sun Lakes Park is an important stop on the newly formed Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, first such trail in the U.S.
To learn more about the park, visit its website at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park.