Grand Coulee Dam — Attraction in Grand Coulee

The mighty Grand Coulee Dam! Roll on Columbia, roll on... Please make the time to take the FREE guided tour. The tour is, as of 2023, the only way to access the road across the crest of the Dam or any part of the Dam for that matter. The tour takes about an hour and is well worth your time. Go to the Visitor Center to ask for tour times and directions to the tour location (first come, first served, so get to the tour location about 30 minutes early). The tour will drive you via air-conditioned busses to the Dam's irrigation pump house and take you about halfway across the Dam's crest roadway. A great place to see the Dam in all its glory is the Crown Point Vista "Park"... about four miles out of town on Hwy 174. Park is in quotes because there's nothing there but an overlook and a badly maintained gravel parking area, but it's the most breathtaking view available and worth the short drive. The laser show lasts about 32 minutes and is well produced. Projected directly onto the spillway of the Dam, the best place to view the show is either from the stands next to the Visitor Center parking lot or the park directly below. The roar of the water falling more than 500 feet down the spillway gives me goosebumps every time. We visited the Grand Coulee Dam almost every summer when we were kids. My grandfather was a worker on the Dam during its initial construction, so there was a family connection that we all felt growing up. Please don't hesitate to visit and appreciate the scale of one of man's greatest engineering achievements....

Impressive to see...but don't even bother wasting your time taking a tour of this place. First you have to sit in a tin trailer and wait to go through security. But first you have to sit through a laughable 5 minute security video. Then you go through metal detectors and get on a bus. Armed security guards are with you the entire time. Then they take you down to see the generators...then they take you to the top of the dam...and the tour is over. The tour can only last 1 hour from start to finish...and they are strict about this. They start the video right at 10am. Security for 35 people took 15 minutes. It take 7 minutes to drive to the dam. Finally when you're at the dam you get all of about 15-20 minutes...then they say...well we're out of time, tour over...so you can get back to the shed at 11am. VERY disappointing and worst tour I've ever been on. Our tour guide was some high school kid who just had a memorized script and couldn't answer any questions.

You are much better off traveling the 30 minutes west to the Chief Joseph dam...2nd largest dam...and taking that tour. They only happen 3 times a day, but it is well worth it. We were the only people on the tour, and our tour guide spend 2 hours with us, showing us the generator room, taking us inside a generator that was tore out and being repaired. You will not get a bad tour at an Army Corp dam...only bad damn tours are with the bureau of reclamation (which is what...

My father's family is from about 80 miles northeast of the dam so we saw it often as kids when we drove up from California. I took my children there several times over the years. It's an impressive structure for sure.

Now for the negative.... You used to be able to drive across the top of the dam and take an in depth tour of both the original dam and the third powerhouse that was added I think in the 1970's. After 9/11 that was deemed too much of a security risk so you can no longer tour the original dam nor drive across it.

As horrific as 9/11 was, given how massive this structure is, a bomb similar to the Oklahoma City bomb might bend a guard rail at worst. The overreaction by Homeland Security is a disgusting over reach that's pretty much destroyed the visitor experience.

When we are in the area these days, we never bother to stop. The tour of the third powerhouse is still cool but not that big a deal given all the other security restrictions. If you've never been to Grand Coulee it's worth stopping once. It's no longer worth stopping a...