Glines Canyon Spillway Overlook

Glines Canyon Dam stood 210 feet high in a slot of rock eight miles above the lower dam on the Elwha. It was finished in 1927 to power the mills at Port Angeles, and when the park grew around it the dam and its reservoir, Lake Mills, ended up inside Olympic National Park. Its demolition was finished in 2014, and the park left part of the concrete spillway in place and made it a viewpoint. From the rail you look down into the canyon where the dam stood and up a valley that was under water for most of a century, now a braided river running through young alder and replanted conifers on what was lakebed.

The dam's lake had trapped millions of cubic yards of sand and gravel. With the dam gone the river has been carrying that sediment down to the Strait, rebuilding the beaches at the river mouth that had been starving for a hundred years.

Downstream, the lower dam's reservoir drained first. In the summer of 2012, park archaeologists told the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe that their creation site had come back into the open: a rock with two deep hollows, named in Klallam for the coiled baskets they resemble, where by the tribe's teaching the Creator bathed and blessed the Klallam people. No one in the tribe had seen it since the water rose behind Elwha Dam in 1913. Within days tribal members walked down and stood on it.

Getting here now takes some effort. Floods washed out Olympic Hot Springs Road below the overlook, and the valley beyond Madison Falls is open only to walkers and cyclists.