The huge Grand Coulee Dam - the largest concrete structure in the world - is eighty miles west of Spokane. When work began in 1933, it was as much a political icon as it was an engineering feat. Probably the most ambitious scheme of Roosevelt's New Deal, this massive dam provided jobs for hundreds of workers from all over the country, including folk singer Woody Guthrie , who also worked on the Bonneville Dam in the Columbia Gorge and was commissioned to write twenty songs about the Columbia project. These were originally played at local rallies, held to raise investment money and combat propaganda from private power companies that wanted to monopo lize power production. The dam's unquestioned heyday, though, was during World War II, when its waterpower was harnessed into the making of aluminum that became essential to the production of war materiel.

Grand Coulee Dam is now the world's biggest producer of hydroelectricity, and has certainly controlled flooding lower down the Columbia. Unfortunately, power-guzzling agricultural and industrial demands have made this dam, like others along the Columbia, a potent symbol of the decline of native salmon species, whose migration routes have largely disappeared in recent decades, thanks to the looming turbines and concrete walls in their way.

The earlier, heroic story of power production is detailed in the visitor center (tel 509/633-9265, ; free), on Hwy-155 on the west side of the dam, which also runs free tours of the dam and its generating plants (summer daily 9am-9pm; rest of year daily 9am-5pm). The dam itself is initially something of an anticlimax; because of its horizontal layout, it just doesn't look that big - a trick of the hugely scaled scenery that surrounds it. On summer nights it's lit up by a laser show that takes place from 8.30pm to 10pm, depending on the month.

The neighboring towns of Coulee Dam, Grand Coulee and Electric City have a few motels and fairly dire restaurants . More appealingly, over thirty campgrounds are scattered around the long, spindly reservoir of Lake Roosevelt, which becomes more woody and secluded as you get further north. The more noteworthy spots include Spring Canyon Campground , located on the lake itself (tel 509/725-2715), and Steamboat Rock State Park , 12 miles south of Grand Coulee (tel 509/633-1304).

Grand Coulee Dam

• Grand Coulee Dam

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