Dry Falls Vista House

Dry Falls became a park because a grocer kept asking. In 1925 Frank McCann of Coulee City took the idea to the state parks committee, and three years later the state built a stone Vista House on the rim, dedicated on July 25, 1928. The six-sided building still stands at the edge of the cliff.

The Depression did the next round of work. In 1934 the state parks superintendent, William Weigle, found his laborers in the camps that had filled with men looking for work on Grand Coulee Dam, and they extended the stone wall along the rim and built a caretaker's house. The caretaker, Charles Geizentanner, hired in 1935, lectured visitors at the wall and wrote a pamphlet calling the falls the Wonder of Wonders and the Mystery of Mysteries.

After the war the parks chairman, Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers, bought the homesteads below the cliff and built a resort park around the lakes, with a golf course, stables and cabins. In 1947 critics said nearly two thirds of the state parks budget had gone into it and called it Vic's Folly. It became one of the most popular parks in the state anyway. The lakes at the foot of the cliff are the old plunge pools, now fed by groundwater.

The Dry Falls Interpretive Center was dedicated on May 15, 1966, a modernist building by the Spokane architect Kenneth Brooks with a wall of glass facing the cataract. In 1994 the state dedicated it to J Harlen Bretz, thirteen years after his death.