Banks Lake and Steamboat Rock
— the flat-topped rock above still water.
Not only on a wall.
“The reservoir came to this coulee in 1951, when the Bureau of Reclamation began filling the Upper Grand Coulee from Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam. Banks Lake runs twenty-seven miles north from Dry Falls to Electric City, held between black basalt walls the Ice Age floods cut and never finished. Steamboat Rock is what the floods left standing in the middle, a flat-topped basalt mesa rising about eight hundred feet above the water with roughly six hundred acres of meadow and ponderosa on the top. The Sinkiuse-Columbia knew this country long before the dam. On a still summer morning the rock holds the day's first light before anything else does.
Banks Lake and Steamboat Rock, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Banks Lake is a twenty-seven-mile reservoir in the Upper Grand Coulee of central Washington, held in place by Dry Falls Dam at the south end and North Dam at Electric City. The Bureau of Reclamation began filling it in 1951 as the equalising reservoir for the Columbia Basin Project, water pumped up from Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam to feed irrigation across more than half a million acres of Grant, Adams, and Franklin counties. The coulee itself is much older. Pleistocene glacial floods from Lake Missoula rerouted the Columbia through this channel ten to fifteen thousand years ago, scouring it into the Columbia River Basalt and leaving the dry walls and the Dry Falls escarpment behind. Steamboat Rock, the basalt butte at the middle of the modern lake, was an island in that older river.
Steamboat Rock rises about eight hundred feet from the surface of Banks Lake and carries a flat mesa top of roughly six hundred acres. It is Columbia River Basalt, the same Miocene flood basalt that floors the Columbia Plateau, laid down in immense lava sheets between about sixteen and six million years ago by fissure vents in southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon. The Ice Age Missoula floods then plucked, scoured, and quarried the basalt around the butte until only this mesa remained standing in the channel. The Sinkiuse-Columbia and other interior Salish peoples knew it long before settlers arrived; Steamboat Rock State Park was established by Washington in 1971, and the trail up the south face climbs through ponderosa pine and sage to the top of the mesa.
Banks Lake holds full pool through summer and is most popular from late May through Labor Day. Steamboat Rock State Park is built around the butte and a long stretch of the surrounding shoreline, with a marina at Devil's Punchbowl, a swimming beach below the south face of the rock, and camping ringed along the water. The mesa trail is exposed and shadeless; midday temperatures on top can run noticeably hotter than the camp at the water. Spring brings wildflowers and migrating birds up the coulee from the Columbia; autumn turns the cottonwoods along the shore gold against the basalt walls. In winter the park stays open at a reduced footprint, and the boat ramps close once ice forms along the shallows.