Banks Lake

The story of Banks Lake really starts around sixteen million years ago, when enormous lava flows spread across this part of Washington and hardened into layer upon layer of black basalt. Much later, near the end of the last Ice Age, an ice dam far to the northeast held back a vast lake, and when that dam broke it released a wall of water so huge it is hard to picture. These Ice-Age floods roared across eastern Washington again and again, tearing at the basalt and carving out the strange, stripped country called the channeled scablands.

The Grand Coulee is the grandest scar the floods left behind, the largest coulee on the whole Columbia Plateau and one of the finest examples anywhere of a canyon cut by a giant, retreating waterfall. Steamboat Rock is a piece of the old plateau the floods could not wash away, an island of basalt left standing in the middle of the torrent. Today Banks Lake and Steamboat Rock are stops on the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, which strings together the best places to read this astonishing chapter of the earth's story.

By the time the floods were done, the upper Grand Coulee was a dry, sheer-walled trench, spectacular but empty. That changed with the Columbia Basin Project, the huge federal effort to bring water to the arid farmland of central Washington. Grand Coulee Dam, finished in the early 1940s, could generate power and lift Columbia River water, but the region needed a place to store that water and release it steadily to the irrigation canals.

The old coulee was the perfect natural tank. Engineers built an earthen dam at each end of the upper coulee, pumped Columbia River water up into it, and by 1953 had filled the valley floor to create a reservoir 27 miles long. Water from Banks Lake now feeds an irrigation system that waters well over half a million acres, growing dozens of different crops across land that was once bone-dry sagebrush. It is a rare thing to stand on a beach and know the whole lake is, in a sense, a machine.

For visitors, Banks Lake is first and foremost open water in a place that has very little of it. Anglers come for walleye, smallmouth and largemouth bass, yellow perch, rainbow trout, and kokanee, and the lake has a strong reputation among Washington fishermen. Boaters, paddlers, and swimmers spread out across coves and along the base of the cliffs, and boat launches and beaches are dotted down its length.

The hub of it all is Steamboat Rock State Park, a large park near the north end of the lake with camping, sandy swimming beaches, and trails, including a climb up onto the flat top of Steamboat Rock itself for a view straight down the coulee. State Route 155 runs the length of the east side, so even without a boat you can drive the canyon, stop at pull-offs, and watch the light change on the basalt through the day.

Because this is high desert, weather is part of the experience. Summers are hot and bright, winters cold, and wind can turn the flat water choppy in a hurry, so it pays to keep an eye on the sky. A little planning turns Banks Lake into a full, easy day of swimming, casting, and canyon-gazing.

Banks Lake stretches south from the towns of Grand Coulee and Coulee Dam down to Coulee City, with State Route 155 tracing the northern half past Steamboat Rock. The state park and the main launches are your best bets for beaches, restrooms, and easy water access, while long reaches of shoreline in between have nothing at all, so top off fuel and pick up water and food in town before you settle in.

It pairs naturally with Grand Coulee Dam just to the north, one of the largest concrete structures ever built, whose visitor center and summer laser light show are a memorable evening after a day on the lake. Farther south, Dry Falls marks the spot where the floods once poured over a cliff many times wider than Niagara, now silent and dry. Together they make the Grand Coulee one of the great, under-visited road-trip stretches in the West: enormous scenery, a good swim, and a geologic story most people have never heard.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.