Monday, May 9, 2022 - We drove for four hours from Walla Walla to Grand Coulee, Washington. We only encountered one incident on the drive. About 30 minutes out of Walla Walla on a fairly steep downhill section of the road, we encountered a small car park on the side of the road. As we neared the car, two large dogs (about the size of large yellow Labrador retriever) jumped out of the car and began to wander across the road. We hit our brakes quite hard. This was likely the hardest that I have hit the brakes since we began our journey in 2019. One dog wandered off the road with an adult male chasing it while the other just sauntered our in front of us. I think I actually locked up the brakes on the trailer. I was happy that I had just replaced the brakes and that they worked very well. We were able to slow down to a speed that we did not put the dogs in danger. It did get our attention though. It is pretty hard to stop 30,000 pounds of vehicle in a short distance. All the other traffic on the road saw the situation and slowed down to a stop too. All worked our well for the dogs and their not-so-brilliant owners. The rest of our drive to Grand Coulee was excellent.

We drove into Grand Coulee City and then went to the dam to check it out. It is truly an impressive piece of engineering and construction; especially when your realize that construction began in 1933 and ended in 1941. When the dam was built, electricity was not its primary purpose. Irrigation and flood control were important at the time, but electricity generation later became the dams primary purpose. The Grand Coulee Dam creates three times the electricity of Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Nevada. Also, the length of Hoover Dam is 1,244 feet while the Grand Coulee is 5,223 (almost a mile) wide. Power from the Grand Coulee is supplied to eleven western states. It is one of the largest concrete structures in the world with 12 million cubic yards of concrete. With 12 million cubic yards of concrete you could build a four feet wide sidewalk that was four inches thick around the world at the equator; twice. You could also build a highway from Seattle, Washington to Miami, Florida. That's a lot of concrete! Be sure to check our the photo gallery and the video on the dam.

OVERALL TRAVEL COMMENTS: Lisa and I have gone over our itinerary for the next two months. We have determined that if we enter Canada too early, it will be too cold to kayak at the three lakes we want to kayak near Lake Louise. So, we have decided to return to Sand Point, Idaho (Lake Pend Oreille) and the Glacier National Park area before we enter Canada. We will have lots of activities that we like to do in these two locations and we can better explore them. Also, we are trying to avoid being at Lake Louise on May 23 which is Victoria Day; a significant holiday for Canadian campers. May 30 is Memorial Day, so we plan to arrive at Lake Louise just after that date. This means that we will stay at Calgary for a week. Seems that mid-June and later are the best times to hit the early season for kayaking at Lake Louise and the surrounding lakes. We have planned our routing and lengths of stay all the way to Dawson Creek so far. We know when we have to be in Anchorage, Alaska to meet with Bob and Charlotte Capp, so we are leaving some flexibility on our schedule from Dawson Creek to Anchorage.

Tuesday, May 10, 2022 - We drove 30 miles south to the town of Coulee City where we explored a very nice public RV park on Banks Lake. This would have been a great place to camp too, but it was just a little too far from the Grand Coulee Dam. Just south of Coulee City is a unique geologic formation called "Dry Dam." During the last ice age (12,000-15,000 years ago), this area experienced floods that were simply huge. The floods contained 10-times the amount of water flowing on all the other rivers on Earth. The 'coulees' were created by these floods and the Grand (or largest) Coulee is where the huge dam was built in the 1930s. The Dry Dam was four miles long when the water was flowing over the dam and the drop was over 400 feet. This compares to less than one mile for Niagara Falls and a drop of 150 feet. The water depth doing over Niagara is about ten feet whereas the water flow going over Dry Dam was over 300 feet. The floods were about two weeks long and there were about twenty-five of them. For more info, look up Lake Missoula on the Internet. We went to the Dry Dam Museum, but it was closed. We drove down into the area where water had flown in the past, and had a picnic lunch at the foot of the dam. We then hiked around a long plateau of rock in the middle of the flow area called Umatillo Rock. This was an easy three mile hike. Be sure to check out the photo gallery and video on this Dry Dam and the surrounding area.

We then drove to a place called Northrup Canyon where we went for another 3.5 mile hike. The Northrup family homesteaded this canyon in the early 1900s and built some buildings that are still standing . It is a nice area to explore. The canyon is sheltered by cliffs that are about 400 feet tall on one side and a mountain range on the other side. The hike was easy and the weather was perfect for hiking. I took some drone phots when we go back to the ranch areas. Be sure to see them in the photo gallery and video section. After out hike, we drove back to our RV to have dinner and prepare for our trip to Wanatchee, Washington the next day.