Word: damming
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Viewed from the canyon's high rim, the dam looks too small to create, as it will, a patch of mottled green land nearly as big as Connecticut. But all modern irrigation dams look small when compared with what they do. They accomplish their ends by geographical judo, playing on the weaknesses of their rivers...
...word settlers, as used there, is no nostalgic recall of old frontier days. Inside the door sit the 1951 settlers themselves, sun-weathered men & women who have come to Ephrata in search of a new frontier-the irrigated farmland created out of sagebrush desert by Grand Coulee Dam. They ask sober, practical questions, but in their eyes glows the same high excitement that built the U.S. The bureau believes that they are only forerunners of millions or tens of millions who can be given farms and homes in what is now desert...
Grand Coulee Dam is the biggest dam anywhere. Viewed from the gorge below, it looks like the biggest thing on earth. Over its spillway, 1,650 feet wide, the great Columbia River sweeps majestically, a curve of green water up to 17 feet thick. It falls so far (320 feet, twice the height of Niagara) that it seems to fall slowly. The roar of the falling water, though loud, is as smooth as the sound of surf on a distant beach...
Displaced River. A dam high enough (more than 600 feet) to turn the Columbia directly into the Coulee would have backed the water far into Canada. So the dam was built to raise the water level about 350 feet. A small part of the electric power that its turbines generate is used to pump part of the river the rest of the way (280 feet) and spill it into the Coulee. This turbine-pump combination, using a river's energy to raise part of its water over its own high banks, is the key engineering trick that frees irrigation...
Last week, slashing a right-of-way for a power line from Bonneville Dam, lumberjacks brought down a ponderosa pine. Tied by a shriveled leather thong, high in the treetop was the answer to the mystery of Kamela: a bronze cattle bell, inscribed with the date 1878. It carried the words "Saignelegier"-"Chiantel"-"Fondeur." Its clapper was worn smooth by years of gentle tinkling. The people of Kamela guessed that a pioneer had tied it to a sapling that grew into a towering pine...