{"id":4412,"date":"2018-07-21T17:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-07-22T00:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/?p=4412"},"modified":"2018-07-21T10:03:45","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T17:03:45","slug":"electric-city-and-the-grand-coulee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/2018\/07\/21\/electric-city-and-the-grand-coulee\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric City and the Grand Coulee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There is a tour of the dam every hour, so we left thinking we might be able to make it into the 10 tour.\u00a0 We were a bit late for that so we had to wait for the 11am tour.\u00a0 It was already pretty hot that morning when \"\"<\/a>I took a walk out the dead end road that goes \"\"<\/a>along Lake Roosevelt to snap a few pictures from that side of the dam while we waited. \u00a0 I had heard some time back that they pump water up to a lake during low electric usage times (night time) and then let it flow back when they need more power generation during the day.<\/p>\n

Our tour guide was leading her first tour ever,\u00a0 so everyone’s questions went pretty much unanswered.\u00a0\u00a0 I know the government runs this tour, but it’s got to be the most inefficient thing I’ve ever \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>seen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They have you drive over to the other-side (east) of the dam from the main road to join the tour and go thru metal detectors, no purses, fanny packs, or backpacks.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then you get on a small bus and drive right back the way you drove in, then all the way back to the top of the west side of the dam you passed quite a time back.\u00a0\u00a0 They park right next to the main road on the edge of the dam\u00a0 and you walk into a building and into one of the largest elevators I’ve seen that wasn’t a huge loading dock type elevator with doors that opened vertically.\u00a0\u00a0 Supposedly you can fit 56 people in this one, although we were pretty tight with 28!\u00a0 \u00a0You go down about 80 feet to an observation deck over the main pump and pump generators.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The main pumps there are just to pump water up to the reservoirs that feed the agriculture canals.\u00a0 Those are the green things in the foreground.\u00a0\u00a0 You might be able to make out the grey ones all the way back.\u00a0 They are pump\/generators.\u00a0\u00a0 They also pump the water up to the reservoirs, but when more power is needed, use that water from the reservoirs to generate electricity by letting gravity pull it back down thru the impeller and out into the river again.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After just a few minutes in that gallery we were back in the elevator and off to the buses again.\u00a0 But then they drove across the top of the dam (it was the old road pre-9\/11. )\u00a0 They made you \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>use the seat belts for that part of the ride.\u00a0 Why, who knows?\u00a0 \u00a0They did drive a bit odd on top of it, not following in a line, but using both sides of the road.\u00a0\u00a0 No idea why, but it was strange.\u00a0\u00a0 At the other side, where they added powerhouse No. 3 back in the 60’s, the buses each made a U-turn and drove halfway back across, where they stopped and let us out, all the time explaining that in pre-9\/11 you could just walk anywhere “inside” the dam for as long as you wanted.\u00a0 Kids from the high school were getting lost inside the dam often, so they started teaching a class to tell them that at any staircase, just walk up and eventually you would get outside.\u00a0 (Must have been some pretty stupid high schoolers to need that class.\u00a0 A simple sign could have had the same effect.)<\/p>\n

We walked around for a few minutes, over to the long drop side down to the water, and then to the side where the water was just a few feet below us,\u00a0 snapped some pictures and got back on the bus for the long ride all the way back to the east side again.\u00a0\u00a0 Not sure why they didn’t just continue over the top of the dam.\u00a0 We had made that U-turn less than 75′ from where our cars were parked.<\/p>\n

Had the tour started at the visitor center,\u00a0 just a few feet from the pump house, the tour would have taken\u00a0 15 minutes and not required any buses or drivers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Instead there were two bus drivers, two buses and two tour guides and about 50 minutes to do the tour.\u00a0\u00a0 I would not suggest taking it,\u00a0 kind of boring and it took way too long for what you got to see.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We had read about the laser light show they put on every night at 10pm, so we made plans to be there.\u00a0\u00a0 They open all the gates at the top of the dam to let a lot of water come over the spillway.\u00a0 It was very loud\u00a0\"\"<\/a> once they started opening them.\u00a0 The laser show is a history of the area and the building of the dam and what it does for the area.\u00a0 It was done mainly for kids, but interesting to see the laser animated pictures projected on the water cascading down the face of the mile-long dam!<\/p>\n

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One thing we did learn on the tour was a little about the new pump house built between 1967 and 1975.\u00a0\u00a0 I hadn’t realized we were in a Dam Race with the Soviet Union,\u00a0 they were going to build the largest dam in the world so we extended the Grand Coulee so it would be larger then theirs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It also allowed them to put in much larger generators and pen-stocks than the original dam has.\u00a0\u00a0 They told us, that each of the six new pen-stocks can transport 2 or 4 Colorado Rivers amount of water in a comparison with the Hoover Dam and generates 3.5 times the amount of electricity.\u00a0 6.8 Gigawatts vs Hoovers 2.0 Gigawatts.<\/p>\n

I always thought of the Hoover Dam as being very large, but seeing the Grand Coulee made me realize the Hoover dam is pretty small in comparison.\u00a0\u00a0 The GC is just a few feet short of a mile long.<\/p>\n

Here are some pics from the “Resort” we stayed at outside Electric City.\u00a0\u00a0 No ATT or Verizon signal out there,\u00a0 and the WiFi was unusable.\u00a0\u00a0 $100 a night,\u00a0 never again!<\/p>\n

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There is a tour of the dam every hour, so we left thinking we might be able to make it into the 10 tour.\u00a0 We were a bit late for that so we had to wait for the 11am tour.\u00a0 It was already pretty hot that morning when I took a walk out the dead … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Electric City and the Grand Coulee”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling-the-hiways-and-byways"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}