Steamboat Rock

Steamboat Rock rises 800 feet out of Banks Lake, flat-topped and some 600 acres across, a block of columnar basalt that the floods went around and over. Geologists read it as what remains of the upper falls of the Grand Coulee, a twin cataract about twice the height of Dry Falls, which lies some twenty miles downstream. Here the water cut all the way through the basalt layers to the granite underneath. The rock and the country around it figure in the stories of Coyote and the Eagle family that the people of the coulee have told for generations.

For some thirteen thousand years after the floods the rock stood in a dry canyon. Then the Columbia Basin Project closed both ends of the upper coulee with earthen dams and filled the trough between them with water pumped up from behind Grand Coulee Dam. The reservoir, twenty-seven miles long and finished in 1953, was named Banks Lake for Frank Banks, the construction supervisor at the dam, and it left the rock standing at the end of a peninsula with water on nearly every side.

The state park was dedicated on June 20, 1964. A trail climbs about 650 feet to the top, where the walking is flat and the views run up and down the coulee and north to the mountains of the Okanogan. Below, the park keeps lawns, a swimming beach and boat launches on the lake.