Grand Culee Dam

It was not at all what I expected. First of all, I picked a campground at the wrong side of the lake. I thought the dam was at the bottom of the lake in Culee City, well I was wrong. Luckily it was only 27 miles north of the county campground at the bottom of the lake. We had only driven 125 miles from Coeur D'Alene, so it was still early enough in the day to go check out the dam.

Culee City is the first town in a long time that actually had no internet. So much for the Verizon commercial, claiming they have internet pretty much everywhere! We found the spot that they don't!!!

So we drove up to the dam in the early afternoon. It was a beautiful drive along the lake.


We checked out the visitor center and watched an interesting film about how and why the dam was built. It is very different from Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam is a lot higher, but this one stretches out for over a mile long, so it is the biggest dam in North America. It just did not look as impressive than Hoover Dam. We decided to do the dam tour and unfortunately, I have to say it was a big disappointment. We knew that the elevator was not working, but at the time did not realize that the whole tour depends on this elevator.

We went to the third power plant to start the tour (had to leave my purse in the car for security purposes) and started walking out to the dam. We were brought into an area where you normally load the elevator and stood there for about 15 minutes looking at the dam.

This is all we got to see. We never went into the power plant at all. I am glad we decided to stay in Culee City for only one night and move on to Leavenworth the next day.