Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park History

"Its grim black walls of basalt frown across a broken chain of linear lakes, some of them as wide as the coulee floor ….. potholes a hundred feet deep in rock, dry cataracts one hundred to four hundred feet high, and river bars one hundred to two hundred feet thick … under the present semiarid climate it lies naked of forest mantle, every detail of its form clearly displayed." -J Harlen Bretz, Geologist

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park preserves spectacular features of the Columbia Plateau Ice Age Floods. The sheer cliffs, scoured lakes, and cataract edges speak to a series of flood events that completely dwarf the imagination.

Indigenous Lands

This park’s location in the coulees of the Columbia Plateau lies within the traditional territories of Sahaptian and Inland Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. For thousands of years the surreal landscape of the Grand Coulee and the plateau lands that surround it have provided a habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. Shrub-steppe landscapes of the Grand Coulee provide important root collection areas for biscuitroot (Lomatium canbyi) and bitterroot. Traditionally, the Indigenous people of the region leave winter residences in the spring to travel to various river and plateau areas to collect, hunt and fish.

Some tribes ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Yakima Treaty of Camp Stevens in 1855, keeping rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the Grand Coulee. Other tribes and bands such as the Columbia-Moses (Sinkayuse) were subjected to a series of executive orders by US Presidents that established and dissolved reservation areas and ultimately relinquished ownership of their homelands to the US federal government. After government land surveys were completed in 1882, European-American homesteaders began to acquire land in the area that is now Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park.

When Washington Territory was created by an act of Congress in 1853, survey sections 16 and 36 in each township were reserved to be granted to the eventual State of Washington to be held in trust to support public institutions. In places where the reserved sections were already occupied by homesteaders, the county commissioners in the affected county were authorized to locate other lands of equal extent “in lieu of” the unavailable lands. In Grant County, the commissioners selected a block of lands adjacent to the Grand Coulee to fulfill the grant. The lands were transferred to the Washington Commissioner of Public Lands in 1920 and 1926.

J Harlen Bretz’s Outrageous Hypothesis

J Harlen Bretz was a Professor of Geology at the University of Chicago. His curiosity had been piqued by a US Geologic Survey topographic map he had seen, showing a wide, deep coulee in eastern Washington that had no existing river that could have carved. Since the 1820's, geologists had developed their discipline on the foundational belief (uniformitarianism) that landforms and deposits on the earth's surface had formed over long periods of time, by ordinary, observable, continuous processes-- "the present is the key to the past." Without a river, Bretz wondered what force could have carved the coulee?

For eight summers, Bretz traveled from his home in Chicago to the "scablands" of eastern Washington with his wife, two young kids, the family dog, and a few college students. He became convinced that neither stream nor glacial erosion had sculpted the landscape. His evidence was the presence of unusual features:

• huge dry channels (coulees), hundreds of feet deep, with rippled beds of coarse gravel
• blades of resistant bedrock remaining inside the channels
• plateaus stripped down to bare basalt
• massive granite boulders scattered far from a bedrock source
• circular potholes in the basalt surfaces
• dry cataracts, up to 5 times the width of Niagara Falls

In his memoir he recalled, "I could conceive of no geological process of erosion to make this topography except huge, violent rivers of glacial meltwater." Of course, that catastrophic solution ran counter to the prevailing uniformitarian principle. What ensued was one of the great scientific debates of the 20th century.

In 1923, Bretz published a paper outlining his theory of a giant glacial flood carving the features of the area. "These remarkable records of running water...cannot be interpreted in terms of ordinary river action and ordinary valley development," he wrote. Established geologists called his thesis an "outrageous hypothesis," yet he was invited to defend it in front of the Geological Society in Washington, DC in 1927. The debate centered on the fact that Bretz did not have evidence of a source of water large enough to have caused such dramatic features on the landscape.

In 1940, Joseph Pardee, a geologist from Montana, presented his findings about Glacial Lake Missoula. Like Bretz, Pardee had found elements of the landscape in western Montana that didn't fit well into a uniformitarian explanation-- terraced ancient shorelines on valley walls, giant current ripples and immense flood bars on valley floors-- which all pointed to the rapid draining of a huge body of water held in check by a glacial ice dam until it was unable to withstand the pressure of the water and gave way, allowing massive floods, sometimes with a peak flow rate more than 10 times the combined flow of all the present rivers of the world. His work provided the source for the megafloods that Bretz had documented in the Grand Coulee. Combined and refined since, Bretz' explanation of the Grand Coulee story was fully vindicated in 1965, when a group of geologists from the International Association for Quaternary Research toured the region and sent the then-83-year-old Bretz a telegram: "We are all now catastrophists."

Making a Park

In 1925, Frank McCann, a grocer from Coulee City, approached the Washington State Parks Committee with a proposal for a state park at Dry Falls. In 1928, the Committee authorized the construction of the stone Vista House at the Dry Falls viewpoint, and a dedication was held on July 25, 1928.

On November 2, 1933, Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Albert C. Martin reserved 468 acres including the Dry Falls viewpoint, the horseshoe-shaped rim, and portions of the lakes at the base of the rim for park purposes “in order to preserve the scenic as well as historic value of the land.” The land was leased to the State Parks Committee for an annual cost of 1% of the land’s appraised value.

In 1934, State Parks Superintendent William Weigle proposed improvements to the park that could be funded by Great Depression emergency relief programs. When the funds were authorized, he found laborers at nearby camps housing workers who had come to the area looking for work at the Grand Coulee Dam project. The workers repaired and extended the stone wall at the edge of the cliff and built a restroom and caretaker’s house.

In 1935, park caretaker Charles T. Geizentanner was hired. He became an iconic presence at the park, known for his entertaining lectures presented at the edge of the viewpoint and a park information pamphlet which stated that Dry Falls was “one of the six wonders of the nation, but, if properly classified, would rank all the pre-historic wonders of the ages. It would stand out alone and stand supreme as the Wonder of Wonders and the Mystery of Mysteries.”

Park Expansion

In 1945, Washington Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers was appointed to the State Parks Committee and became chairman of the newly created Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) in 1947. Meyers promoted expansion of Dry Falls State Park to include land from the cataract edge to beaches on Park Lake. More than 800 acres of private lands were acquired in 1946, including the Park Lake Resort. On February 3, 1949, Commissioner of Public Lands Jack Taylor withdrew over 1,400 acres of additional state trust lands for park purposes, including most of Umatilla Rock and Deep Lake, tying together Dry Falls State Park and the newly acquired lands. The new park lands became known as Sun Lakes State Park, a rebranding supported by Meyers.

He envisioned the park as a tourist destination, and promoted a wide variety of recreational opportunities, including a 9-hole golf course, artificial fishing pond, riding stables, swimming beach, campgrounds, cabins, and food concessions. In 1947, critics complained that nearly two-thirds of the State Parks budget had been spent on projects at Sun Lakes, calling it “Vic’s Folly.” However, the park quickly became and remains one of the most popular in the state, despite its distance from major population centers. On June 15, 1977, Governor Dixy Lee Ray approved House Bill number 285 renaming the golf course and the fishing pond in the park for Vic Meyers.

On January 24, 1951, the WSPRC acquired 78 acres for the development of a youth camp in the park. Named for Grant County Extension Agent George M. Delany, it was designed to provide a meeting place for youth education groups and has grown to become a Retreat Center for all kinds of groups.

On May 15, 1966, the Dry Falls Interpretive Center was dedicated, providing a unique space to interpret the story of the cataclysmic floods that created the Grand Coulee. The building was designed by Spokane-based architect Kenneth W. Brooks in a modernist style known as “New Formalism.” It features a glass curtain wall highlighting the view of Dry Falls and the Grand Coulee.

On August 6, 1994, the Dry Falls Visitor Center was dedicated to J Harlen Bretz, recognizing his pivotal role in revealing the evidence-based story of the ice age floods. Geologists and park managers spoke about the value of learning from the landscape.

On June 12, 1998, the WSPRC renamed the park “Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park,” recognizing the significance of the features that anchor the park.

In 2009, the US Congress created the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, recognizing the national significance of the phenomenon, and to enable the public to view, experience and learn the features and story of the Ice Age floods through the collaborative efforts of public and private entities. Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park will serve as a hub in the interpretation of this spectacular testament to the power of nature.