| Click picture to see a larger version. | |
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Our first stop was the Stonerose Fossil Site in Republic, WA. This site is a cutout along the road that exposes an ancient lake bed from the Eocene Epoch 50 million years ago. |
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Armed with a hammer and chisel we split rocks for over three hours. Looks like Val just found a good one! |
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We were the only ones here until the school bus unloaded. Luckily the kids got bored and left after an hour. |
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We did well finding fossils. We were allowed to bring home 3 fossils each. Here's a pine. |
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Pine close-up |
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A Dawn Redwood |
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Dawn Redwood close-up |
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Alder |
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Alder close-up |
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Two Pines |
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This is called a "lake bottom" as it's a collections of many fossilized leaves and sticks that fell to the bottom of the ancient lake. The two rocks are mirror images of each other |
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Lake bottom close-up |
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Grand Coulee Dam. This picture is pieced
together from several images to make one large panorama. (If you're using Windows XP you can expand the picture to full size to get the grand view...click on the thumbnail and wait for the picture to load. Then, hold your mouse over the picture until the orange box appears in the lower right of the image. Click it to make the picture full size.) |
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View of the dam from Crown Point Vista. Construction on the dam started in 1933 and was completed in 1942. It's 550 feet tall and 55 feet wide at the base |
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Another view of the dam from Crown Point Vista. The section on the left is newer than the original dam. |
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Close up of the spillway. There's enough concrete in the dam to build a 6-foor wide sidewalk around the world. |
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Ron and Val on Crown Point Vista |
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Walking across the dam on the tour. |
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Looking down the tram/elevator |
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Looking down on three of the six giant turbines. Together all the turbines generate 6,809 megawatts of electricity. |
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View from the lower platform |
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Each of those 12 pipes at the top carry 781,128 gallons/minute of water up 280 feet to the Banks Lake Reservoir. This is a completely man-made lake that irrigates 500,000 acres of farmland. Without it there would be no Washington Apples. |
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Looking up the tramway. |
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A view of half of the transformers. |
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Lots of power! |
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This is an area known as Dry Falls. It's located in Central Washington and is made of huge cliffs, hundreds of small lakes, and numerous "coulees" - ravines and ancient basins of waterfalls, some still holding water. |
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Dry Falls was formed 10,000-15,000 years ago when an enormous ice-dam holding back the waters of "Glacier Lake Missoula" catastrophically collapsed. The lake was the size of Lake Ontario. |
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When the ice dam broke, all the water in the lake rolled through central Washington in a wall of water 400 feet deep and several miles wide. Niagara falls is only 165 feet high! |
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These great cliffs formed as the water washed over the land scraping away everything in its path. |
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Now all that's left is a beautifully sculpted landscape showing the power of nature. |
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Orange lichen growing on a rock at Dry Falls. |
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On the way back we stopped at Ginko Petrified Forest State Park near Vantage, WA. |
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As you can see, there's not much here but rocks. The two metal grates in the center of the picture show how the ginko logs are protected from tourists. |
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A petrified Douglas Fir tree |
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A close up |
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Another Douglas Fir |