The falls in Spokane are a perfect spot for a hydro power station and there are two rather than one. The first provided power for the developing town and a second was needed as the demand increased. The larger building is lower down and is a most impressive brick structure. It has an imposing look to it. The upper station is a lot less dramatic. A pale concrete structure but it has some architectural features to it, so it is not totally innocuous. Both of them are still providing power to the region and I imagine will for a long time to come.
Tag Archives: Spokane
A Gondola to Nowhere
There is an interesting tourist attraction in Spokane that I hadn’t been expecting. A gondola ride starts up in the park area, drops down the hillside near the falls and crosses the river where it does a U turn and heads back the way it came. There are groups of the pods together on the wire and they slow everything down to board them. Consequently, you will come to a halt periodically during your ride while people embark and disembark.
The ride is never terribly high off the ground, so it comes right over you if you are walking around the hillside near the falls. A slightly surprising thing to see when you aren’t expecting it. I wonder whether the view of the falls from the gondola is impressive. This is the sort of thing that I would normally be expected to try. However, we only had a limited amount of time there, so I skipped it. Maybe I’ll find out some time in the future?
A Town Full of Bridges
A town on a river means there are likely to be lots of bridges. We’ve lived in London and Chicago, and both were not short of a bridge or two. Spokane seems to have done well in the bridge standings too. There are the large structures carrying the roads across the river and then smaller footbridges including suspension structures. As we walked along the river, we got to see a lot of different bridges and tried out a few of them too.
A Brief Visit to Spokane
The beginning of our vacation involved a decent drive, and our route took us right by Spokane. We may have lived here for over seven years, but we haven’t been to Spokane in that time. In fact, we have been there before but only to the airport which we staged through for a trip we made back when we lived in Chicago. A hotel airport doesn’t really count as visiting a city. Since we had built some time into our schedule, we made a diversion into the center of the city to have a look around.
I had heard about the falls in the middle of the city and that there was some nice development along the river, so we headed for that area. Turned out to be a really nice afternoon to be walking around the river so we had got quite lucky. There are some other parts of our visit that will justify their own posts in due course so I shall just start with some shots of the falls and some of the buildings in the areas that we saw. I shall add more of the sights in due course.