Coulee City, Washington — Waterfront Courtesy of Engineers

Coulee City sits beside Banks Lake, which is an amusing outcome for a town built next to what was once essentially a dry canyon.

The Grand Coulee itself was carved by catastrophic Ice Age floods, leaving enormous basalt walls and a broad abandoned channel. Nearby Dry Falls preserves the scale of the water that once tore through it.

Twentieth-century engineers found another use for the empty coulee.

Water pumped uphill from Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam is stored in Banks Lake before entering the Columbia Basin Project's irrigation system. An ancient flood channel became a reservoir roughly twenty-seven miles long.

Coulee City acquired fishing, boating and waterfront where geology had left dryness.

The Ice Age excavated the basin. The Bureau of Reclamation filled part of it back up.