Dry Falls, Washington, United States

4Susan H 5:00 PM Sep 20, 2021

Discover Pass Required
This area is accessible by going through the state park. There are 3 lakes in this area. You can get to the lakes by either by hiking or diving a narrow dirt road. We drove our pickup with no problem using 2 wheel. Higher vehicle clearance is a must to get to Dry Falls Lake and Perch Lake. Deep Lake is much easier and is paved. All 3 lakes have fishing with varying limits and rules.

4El_Fez 5:00 PM Feb 29, 2008

Camping for the civilized camper
I love to travel. Doesn’t matter how far - a few hundred miles or the other side of the globe is all the same to me. The cultural nexus of Vienna is just as good as the tiny town of Mansfield (population 500). Putting myself up in an exotic hotel is just as thrilling as camping under the stars - which is what I did just recently, a week of camping at the Dry Falls State Park, in eastern Washington. Dry Falls is the sight of a big dry falls, a half mile wide crescent shape that - if water was flowing over it, would be about ten times the side of the Niagara falls. The falls were formed thousands of years ago when the great ice ages were upon us. A huge ice dam formed in Idaho, creating Glacial Lake Missoula, a lake quite literarily thousand of miles wide with billions of gallons of water behind it. When the ice gave way, the water had to go somewhere - that somewhere was dry falls. This sudden rush of water put great portions of Washington and Oregon under hundreds of feet of water in hours. And I was camping right in the valley carved by the deepest, most intense part of the flow. The campgrounds is pretty much what you would expect - boating and swimming on the nearby Sun Lakes (about a hundred yards from where we were set up at), hiking nearby, a gold course just over the hill (didn’t play, but its there if you like that sort of thing), and of course all kinds of geological features to explore. At the top of the falls, about two miles up Highway 17 is the Dry Falls Interpretive Center, just outside of Coulee City. They have a couple of good lookout points, a smallish building with maps and the story of how the process unfolded and how the geologists unlocked the mystery, plus a small bookstore with videos about the flood, assorted stuffed animals (including the most adorable wooly mammoth plushy ever) and all kinds of books. The City of Coulee (although calling it a city is generous) is just another couple of miles past that, with a handful of amenities - a general store, some restaurants, a gas station and a motel. Pretty basic, but really small. If you need something bigger, the town of Soap Lake is to the south about 17 miles. Other activities include the Grand Coulee Dam, which is easily worth a day's visit alone (be sure to stay for the laser show on the dam), the Ape Caves just to the south of Sun Lake (no apes, but genuine caves where primitive cavemen once lived) and some great short road trip potential. The only down side of the park? I don’t know if it's always this bad - but the two times I've camped there (once in the late eighties and just recently in 2007), it can get VERY windy. Two nights on this trip - the first night we got there and the night before we packed up and left, the winds were brutal. Our neighbors, who did a very poor job putting up their tent, had theirs leaning nearly all the way over. Ours was sturdy, but I didn’t get much sleep that night. Like I said, I only have a very small sample to work from, but 100 percent of the time I've camped there, high winds were a factor. Strangely, no bike rentals anywhere that I could find. One would think something like that would be a natural for the area, but now. Pity - there were some great back roads for that sort of thing. At the end of the day, I probably wont go back - but not for lack of amenities or for lack of anything to do, but that twice pretty much mines that area out of new and interesting things to do. But for the first timer, it's great stuff. The area is beautiful, with gorgeous sunsets every night. There's plenty of amenities close at hand, but you're distant enough to feel like you're outdoors. There's plenty to do with only a short drive away.