Source: Sheriff’s office warns of serious weather now; boaters get out of lake – The Star
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20 bands playing rhythm and blues festival at Sunbanks Lake Resort
It’s blues time at Sunbanks Lake Resort on the shores of Banks Lake in Electric City.
Sunbanks has won the state Blues award for the past two years running and this year attracts bands and musicians from all over the country.
On Saturday, award-winning blues musician Matt Andersen is scheduled for the stage with his band, the “Bona Fide.’
His new album, “Honest Man,” debuted at number five on the sales charts in Canada, from where he originally hails. Andersen has toured the world, sharing the stage with such legends as Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, and Greg Allman, among others.
Headlining the four-day event is James Harman’s Bamboo Porch Revue. The Delgado Brothers are back and Hamilton Loomis, Casey Miller & the Barnyard Stompers, Matt Andersen & the Bona Fide, Karen Lovely Band, Ken De-Rouchie Band, Selwyn Birchwood, Twang Junkies with Bob Hill, and Billy Stoops and the Dirt Angels are all scheduled to make appearances during the festival.
Other bands and performers include Acoustic Noise, James Coates, Shoot Jake, Forest Beutel, Adam Hendricks, Franco & the Stingers, Stacy Jones Band, Trevalyan Triangle, Sara Brown Band and the Vaughn Jensen Band fill out the list.
Harmon hails out of Anniston, Alabama and started performing in 1962. He has performed in 28 countries and has built up a massive song catalog.
Another headliner, Hamilton Loomis, is out of Texas and performs all over the country.
Laser Light Show starts nightly on May 28
Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center Begins Laser Light Show May 28
GRAND COULEE, Washington – On May 28, Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center will begin its extended summer season hours, along with its Laser Light Show which plays nightly through the end of September.
Visitor Center hours will be from 8:30 a.m. until one hour past the start of the Laser Light Show. Through the end of July, the show will begin at 10 p.m. For August, the show begins at 9:30 p.m. and for September, 8:30 p.m.
May 28 will also begin an increase in the number of public tours into the John W. Keys III Pump-Generating Plant. These one hour tours occur daily from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Visitors will ride a shuttle bus to the pumping plant to view gigantic pumps lifting water from Lake Roosevelt to Banks Lake, which then delivers water throughout the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. The shuttle will then take visitors across the top of Grand Coulee Dam for spectacular views of Lake Roosevelt and the Columbia River.
Tours are on a first-come, first-served basis. No reservations are taken and space is limited.
For more information call the Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center at (509) 633-9265. Or visit: http://www.usbr.gov/pn/grandco
Northrup Canyon invites you
Soon, Northrup Canyon will be full of green. If you like a nice hike, this one is recommended.
It’s a great place to shake off winter and welcome spring. A creek runs through part of it, and a blue sky gives a beautiful contrast to the basalt coulee walls that rise up closely on either side.
Don’t forget to take water. It can be a three- to four-hour hike, or more, depending on how far you want to go.
An old homestead of the Northrup family sits at at nice turnaround spot at the top of the canyon. But you can go further, up a rough trail to a small hidden lake.
A restroom and information kiosk sits near gate at the beginning of the trail, but there no facilities past that. As a part of the state park system, a Discover Pass is required to visit. The most convenient place to get one is at Coulee Playland in Electric City.
Take a tour on a bridge
You can take a unique tour on the bridge across the Columbia River, simply by walking across it and reading several signs depicting history and geology.
The tour is self-guided and free.
It takes advantage of the four-foot-wide sidewalks along each side of the 950-foot span across the river to tell the story, on the upstream side of the bridge, of the building of the dam.
Cross over to the downstream side and you’ll find out just how the site was formed geologically. Its fascinating prehistory led to this being the perfect site to build the Grand Coulee Dam. (Hint: humans weren’t the first to make a dam here.)
Depending on how fast you read, walk and absorb the fantastic story, the tour could take from a half hour to an hour.
Or, if you just want a brisk walk in a unique location with an unobstructed view of the dam, this is a good one.
It’s an exciting walk for most people, and safe, but if you’re extremely queasy about heights, this could be a little too exciting.
The bridge itself rests on two monolithic piers that rest securely on bedrock, each 150 feet high. Approximately 300 tons of structural carbon and silicon steel makes up the cantilever truss bridge that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began to build in late 1934.
It was designed by the Washington Department of Highways for the Columbia Basin Commission to serve a dual purpose, according to documents on file with the Historic American Engineering Record. It would initially serve in the transport of heavy equipment during construction of the dam, then as a permanent highway bridge for State Route 155. That meant the bridge was built to a heavier specification than normally would have been used for a highway bridge.
But as construction of the bridge neared completion, the east pier tilted nine inches, probably because of a deposit of fine glacial material that lay beneath the 20 or 30 feet of gravel at the surface layer.
The incident delayed completion of the bridge for several months, while a 50-ton jack, cables and 72-foot deadman steel beams on the shore kept all in place until the foundation was secured through the construction of pneumatic caissons.