Description
This Honda Element camping trip through eastern Washington takes me to Grand Coulee Dam — the "Eighth Wonder of the World" and the largest hydroelectric power plant in North America — where I meet up with my old friend Russ from RVerTV, camped right next to me on the shore of Banks Lake. But before the dam, this one gets personal.
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I started the morning at one of my favorite free camp spots out at Alkali Lake, packed up the Element, and pointed it toward Soap Lake — a town I only lived in for a single year, my fifth-grade year, but one that left a mark I've never been able to drive past. I stopped by my old elementary school, or what's left of it. Last time I came through it was abandoned and falling apart. Now it's completely torn down, gone, just an empty lot where the blacktop and the bus shop used to be. I walked past the duplex where I lived at unit 514, the place where, before I'd even turned twelve, my mother called the sheriff and told him she didn't want me anymore. What saved me was my grandmother.
She pulled me out of foster care, took me to the farm, and raised me through high school. I don't always know why I keep coming back to this town. Maybe it's just to remind myself where I came from.
From Soap Lake I headed up toward Dry Falls, a place my grandmother brought me to over and over as a kid — back when I didn't understand what I was looking at. Today it's the site of the largest waterfall that ever existed on Earth, carved by the Missoula Floods that ripped through the Channeled Scablands when a glacial lake the size of Lake Huron burst loose. I found Dry Falls fenced off and closed for construction, so we kept rolling north.
Then there she is: Grand Coulee Dam. Almost a hundred years old, started back in the 1930s, and still moving roughly 800,000 gallons a second. A single bay of one powerhouse puts out more electricity than Seattle and Portland combined need to run. I walk the visitor center and break down the anatomy of the dam — the penstocks wide enough to hold three school buses side by side, spillway gates big enough to drop a full-size pickup through, a structure that outweighs every pyramid at Giza stacked together. Egypt built a tomb. We built a machine that takes a river running through a desert and makes the desert drink.
And parked right out front of the visitor center? A Sprinter van some of you will recognize. That's Russ from RVerTV. We hadn't hung out since 2023, so we caught up, talked the dam, talked fishing, and ended up booking sites right next to each other at Coulee Playland on Banks Lake — the reservoir that supplies around 60% of the irrigation water for Washington farmland, pumped uphill out of Lake Roosevelt because of the dam we'd just toured. I paid for a site this time, just to run the AC, which isn't usually my style, but the lakefront spot was worth it.
Places in this video: Alkali Lake, Soap Lake, Dry Falls, Grand Coulee Dam, Banks Lake, Coulee Playland — eastern Washington.
#HondaElement #HondaElementCamper #GrandCouleeDam #RVerTV #OffGridLiving #VanLife #Nomad #PacificNorthwest #FreeCamping #BanksLake