Lake Lenore Caves

In WSDOT's own photograph this panel is pocked with dozens of ragged holes that look like gunshot, clustered over the drawing of the shelters and through the paragraph saying that people of the Colville Confederated Tribes still treat much of the Grand Coulee as sacred and gather plants here for their ceremonies. Names are scratched into its posts. The panel dates the first use of the shelters to at least 5,000 years ago, and a caption says archaeologists removed every artifact from the site for study and safe storage.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Lenore Caves — steps away
  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.
• Dry Falls Vista House — 8.7 mi
  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.
• Soap Lake — 8.8 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 — 29 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

• Story of Dry Falls — 8.7 mi