Story of Dry Falls

The board states as plain fact what geologists fought over for decades. In the 1920s J Harlen Bretz argued that floods, not a slow river, had cut these coulees, and in 1927 he was invited to Washington, D.C., to defend the idea before colleagues who called it outrageous; the ice-dammed lake in Montana that supplied the water won acceptance only later. The cliff runs about 3.5 miles and drops more than 400 feet, against Niagara's mile and 165 feet. The falls began near Soap Lake. The board spells their retreat receeded.

What the plaque says

Story of Dry Falls These cliffs are skeletal remnants of what was once the world's largest waterfall. They bear stark witness to the tremendous power of catastrophic floods that swept over Eastern Washington at the end of the last Ice Age. The falls began 20 mi. to the south, but receeded upstream through powerful erosive action. The retreat of the falls gave birth to the canyon below, the lower Grand Coulee, with the enormous force of the floodwaters spewing several cubic miles of rock over vast areas downstream. Today Dry Falls remains as one of the most spectacular geologic wonders of the Age of Ice.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dry Falls Vista House — steps away
  The viewpoint a Coulee City grocer talked the state into in 1925, with a stone Vista House on the rim from 1928 and a glass-walled interpretive center from 1966.
• Lake Lenore Caves — 8.6 mi
  Shallow shelters in a coulee wall that people used for thousands of years, where the archaeologists who arrived in 1958 found that collectors had dug them over first.
• Soap Lake — 16 mi
  A mineral lake at the foot of the Grand Coulee that drew health seekers by the thousand, and whose older name, Smokiam, the town declined to give back.
• Steamboat Rock — 21 mi
  An 800-foot basalt butte that geologists read as the remains of a waterfall twice the height of Dry Falls, now almost an island in a reservoir pumped up from the Columbia.

More markers nearby

• Lake Lenore Caves — 8.7 mi