Part 2: Dam tour, the American side

From Saskatchewan we motor into the headwinds of Montana and skirt the Rockies at Glacier National Park. We then cross the Flathead and pick up Lake Koocanusa just west of Eureka, Montana.

Lake Koocanusa is what happened when the Libby Dam was completed in 1975, backing up the Kootenay well before it turns into the Kootenai in Montana. The result is a lake on the KOOtenay, half in CANada and half in the USA.
The Libby Dam was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, who provide a lovely, and apparently free, campsite just below the dam:

From the Libby Dam and Libby, Montana, along the Kootenai to Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, and then down to Sandpoint, on the Pend Oreille. We followed it to Albeni Falls Dam (1955), located between Oldtown and Priest River, both in Idaho.

Ideally, we would have followed the Pend Oreille up into Canada to where it joins the Columbia just south of Trail, BC. However, that would have involved two trips through Customs and Immigration, which didn't feel worth it, so instead we missed the Box Canyon, Boundary, Seven Mile, and Waneta dams and cut across from Tiger, Washington, to Kettle Falls on Roosevelt Lake, which is what happened to the Columbia when the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest electric-power producing facility and largest concrete structure in the USA, was completed in 1942.

One of the remarkable features of this dam is the water that is pumped uphill at this point to fill the Grand Coulee, now called Banks Lake. Much of that water is removed in turn for irrigation, but some of it generates power as it is returned to the Columbia during times when irrigation is not needed and power is.
Downstream from the Grand Coulee Dam is mostly a lake created by the Chief Joseph Dam (commissioned in 1955, but completed in 1979, when it achieved its present height and generating capacity); however, the road between the two cuts overland, so we have only the map to confirm this.


The irony of naming this dam after Chief Joseph, chief of the Nez Perce who ended his days on the Colville Indian Reservation, while it blocks the salmon on which the Indians used to depend seems inescapable.

From the Chief Joseph Dam we followed Lake Pateros, which is the Columbia raised by the Wells Dam (1967).

The Rocky Reach Dam (1961, but added to in 1971) is the first of the Columbia dams built to be relatively fish friendly. Consequently, Lake Entiat above it has a small salmon run.

The Rocky Reach Dam was built without public money; one of the participants was ALCOA, which consequently has a plant just south of Wenatchee.
The oldest dam to span the Columbia is the Rock Island Dam (1933), just south of Wenachee.

The Wanapum Dam (1963), near Vantage, Washington, creates Wanapum Lake. Both are named after the local Indian band.

The Priest Rapids Dam (completed 1961) and Lake are named after the rapids the dam drowned.

From here it is possible to proceed to the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick on a road through the Hanford Nuclear site, but it is not possible to see Hanford Reach, "the only free-flowing, non-tidal stretch of the Columbia River in the United States". So we decided to go east to see the lower two dams on the Snake River, leaving the Little Goose and Lower Granite dams, which render the Snake navigable all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, for another occasion.

The Lower Monumental Lock and Dam (1969 and 1981) separates Lake Herbert G West from Lake Sacajawea:

The lowest lock and dam on the Snake is the Ice Harbor Lock and Dam (1961 and 1976). After this it's all Columbia River and four more dams to the Pacific Ocean.


At this point the van develops a coolant leak, and we're left to explore the delights of Kennewick on foot for several days. But that's for another blog post.

The Tri-Cities are on the banks of Lake Wallula, which extends upriver into the Hanford site, east to the Ice Harbor Dam, and south to the McNary Dam (1954, fully-operational 1957, 2.2 km long) at Umatilla, on the Oregon side of the border between Washington and Oregon.

The highest lock on the system (at 110 feet) is at the John Day Dam (1971), which creates Lake Umatilla.

The Dalles Lock and Dam (1957) create Lake Celilo. The dam submerged Celilo Falls, which, Wikipedia tells us, was: "the economic and cultural hub of Native Americans in the region and the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America".
But it helped make the river navigable, and still produces a lot of electricity.

The last of the Columbia dams is the Bonneville Lock and Dam, located in the Columbia Gorge. The Bonneville Lock (1993) replaced a much smaller lock (1938) which in turn replaced the Cascades Locks and Canal (first operated in 1896 to bypass the Cascades rapids). Both early locks apparently still exist, but the latter is underwater, as are the Cascades it bypassed, and the former is unused. The Bonneville Dam (1937) has two powerhouses and is actually several dams connecting two islands. It creates Lake Bonneville.

There appears to be a short stretch of swift water down from the dam, but very soon the Columbia becomes tidal.

And that's the end of the Columbia.

Part 1: Dam tour, the Canadian side

We in North America tend to assume that the man-made wonders of the world are elsewhere: the pyramids, Ankor Wat, the Acropolis and Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Manchu Pichu, the Great Wall of China, the statues of Easter Island...
I wonder how many of us realize that we have the equivalent of any of these right here, in the Pacific Northwest of North America?
The pacification of the Columbia River and the dams that made this possible are as remarkable, in their own way, as anything other civilizations have produced. That this is unrecognized by most of us is surely only because what has been created appears so ordinary, so obviously functional, and so few of us look at the system in its entirety.

Sandy and I recommend Blaine Harden's "A River Lost", if this topic at all appeals to you: very readable, by a journalist who grew up in Moses Lake in eastern Washington. He has his biases, but many of his insights illuminated what we saw on this trip.

The Columbia is the 4th largest river by outflow volume in North America, and the largest to flow into the Pacific. In doing so, it drops 820 meters from Canal Flats on Columbia Lake in BC to Astoria, Oregon on the Pacific.
It drains an area the size of France, much of which is irrigated. The Columbia and its most significant tributaries, the Kootenay (Kootenai in the US), the Snake, and the Pend d'Oreille (Pend Oreille or Penderay in the US) are collectively also by far the largest producer of hydro power in North America, (quite possibly the world), and the combined Columbia and Snake are navigable as far east as Lewiston, Idaho, creating a water-transportation route for tug and barge as well as for smaller ships.
The result is that the Columbia and its tributaries have become, for the most part, a series of reservoirs masquerading as lakes, with the largest of these (thanks to the Columbia River Treaty) in British Columbia.
Nearly 100 dams make all this possible; however, most of these are minor and created solely for irrigation purposes, so Sandy and I decided to pursue only 25 of the 31 most significant on this trip, which leaves two on the Snake and four on the Pend d'Oreille which didn't fit our route, for viewing on another occasion.
We started in BC with the Keenleyside Dam, completed in 1968, on the Columbia at Castlegar:

The Keenleyside Dam creates the Arrow Lakes, which stretch all the way from Castlegar to Revelstoke, the site of the Revelstoke Dam, also on the Columbia.
The Kootenay meets the Columbia at Castlegar, so instead of following the Columbia, which doesn't have a road along it at this point,we followed the Kootenay towards Nelson and Kootenay Lake, viewing five small power dams in rapid succession: first the Brilliant Dam (1944)

...second the South Slocan Dam (1928):

...third the Lower Bonnington Dam (1924)

...fourth the Upper Bonnington Dam (1906)

...and fifth the Corra Lynn Dam (1932), which raised the level of Kootenay Lake to its present height.

From Nelson, the tour took us up Kootenay Lake and up to the Duncan Dam, completed in 1967 to control the flow of the Duncan River into the Kootenay River. Of the Columbia system dams we viewed, it alone has no power generation.

There's a road of sorts from the Duncan Dam past Trout Lake to Galena Bay, where a ferry crosses Upper Arrow Lake. The road continues from here to Revelstoke, the site of the Revelstoke Dam, completed in 1984, and one of the largest on the system.

The Revelstoke Dam creates Lake Revelstoke, which is the Columbia for the next 100 km, up to another of the big ones, the Mica Dam, finished in 1973, which in turn creates Kinbasket Lake, which stretches from near Golden to near Valemount, some 200 km.


At this point we temporarily abandon the Dam Tour, and head across the Rockies to view the lovely dams of central Saskatchewan, the Qu'Appelle and the Gardiner on the South Saskatchewan. They, however are not part of the Tour, having nothing at all to do with the pacification of the Columbia system.