Rocky Reach Discovery Center

The viewing gallery sits beside the fish ladder at Rocky Reach Dam, seven miles north of Wenatchee on Highway 97A. Adult salmon, steelhead and lamprey climb the ladder to get past the dam, and they pass a set of underwater windows that were widened and thickened during the 2019–2021 remodel so that children and people in wheelchairs can see in. The fish are seasonal. Salmon find their way home by smell, the staff point out, back to the stream where they hatched.

The Rocky Reach Discovery Center stands above all this on the west bank of the Columbia, overlooking the spillway and the ladder. Chelan County PUD runs it, and admission is free. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, the year around.

Four levels above the ladder

The exhibits fill four levels. A sternwheeler game called Steamboat Captain asks the player to steer a steamship through a treacherous stretch of the Columbia. At Hydropower Know How a visitor cranks a turbine and makes electricity by hand. A scale model of the dam lights up section by section. Fish Tales offers salmon innards to handle, “minus the slime,” in the center’s phrase. First People and Living River take up the people of the Columbia and their history. An augmented-reality app lets a visitor swim with salmon, fly a drone over the dam, or ride through the turbine as a water molecule. A deck on the roof looks out on the river and the dam. The Rocky Reach Café serves breakfast, lunch and fresh-baked goods on weekdays until 2 p.m.

Pieces from the collection rotate through a weekly spotlight. In September 2026 these included:

• projectile points shaped from stone chosen for its working properties
• a pipe historically associated with Chief Moses
• beaded gloves from the Native American collection
• mortars, pestles, metates and manos used to grind food and plants
• a ceremonial drum given to PUD commissioners by members of the Okanagan Nation Alliance in 2007

The drum thanked the PUD for supporting an international effort to return sockeye salmon to Skaha Lake in British Columbia after a 50-year absence. It shows Coyote leading salmon upriver, and its message translates as “we are all helping to bring them back.”

Visitors no longer cross the dam on their own. Guided powerhouse tours go inside the working plant at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. On the hard-hat tours for school groups, students go beneath the powerhouse floor and stand under a spinning generator that weighs 2.5 million pounds.

Petunia Island and the C5 runner

Outside, the lawns and gardens cover 17 acres within a 38-acre park. On Petunia Island, 8,000 annuals are planted in a new design every year, and colored flowers spell out the PUD logo. A second bed of red, white and blue annuals forms the U.S. flag. There are dozens of varieties of dahlias, clusters of alpine trees, picnic shelters, horseshoe pits, a playground and a pergola where weddings are held at no charge. A brochure leads a self-guided walk through the park arboretum, a loop of 42 cataloged species from flowering magnolias to tall pines. The walk starts and ends at the Discovery Center parking lot and takes one to two hours.

The turbine exhibit went up in the summer of 1998. It is built from the hub and blades of Generating Unit C5, saved when that unit was rehabilitated.

The park holds a Fall Harvest Roundup on Saturday, October 24, 2026, from 1 to 4 p.m. It has hayrides, games, trick-or-treating and a visit from L-Bow the Clown.

Salmon Festival

The Wenatchee River Salmon Festival marks the salmon’s return to the Wenatchee River. Those fish travel 500 miles and pass over seven dams to reach the place they were born. The 2026 festival was the 34th, held September 17–19 under the theme “We Are River People.” Chelan PUD, Friends of Northwest Hatcheries and the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery host it, with tribal educators and dozens of agencies and volunteers.

On the first two days the yellow buses roll in. In 2026 they brought more than 2,000 third and fourth graders from 70 classes across five counties, and the center and grounds were closed to the public. Community Day on the Saturday is free and open to all. Regional tribal drummers and dancers led intertribal dancing at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The grounds also held:

• a salmon maze
• a reptile show
• a Native American village
• Rolling Rivers
• gyotaku fish printing
• a giant fish aquarium
• archery, a climbing wall and disc golf
• animal handlers with live wildlife

A dam paid for with bonds

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first considered the Rocky Reach site in its 1934 “308 Report.” It picked a spot about a mile upriver. In the 1950s, PUD studies found better anchoring rock and a narrower channel where the dam now stands.

The Federal Power Commission licensed the project on July 12, 1956. Construction began on October 2, 1956, under Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation, the District’s engineering design firm. The first task was building cofferdams to seal off the spillway area during low water. Over the five-year first phase, crews moved 3.3 million cubic yards of dirt and rock. The PUD gives the employment peak as 2,184 workers in July 1959; HistoryLink dates that peak to 1961.

The first seven generators went into commercial operation on November 1, 1961, six months ahead of schedule. The project cost $273.1 million and was paid for with revenue bonds, with no tax money. That cost included moving a rail line and highways and relocating the Town of Entiat.

Four more units followed between 1969 and 1971, after the Columbia River Treaty, to use water released from storage in Canada and from Libby Dam in Montana. Beginning in 1995, all eleven units received adjustable-blade turbine runners designed to be easier on young salmon. That work was completed in 2006. A juvenile fish bypass system, the first of its kind, was completed in 2003.

Horsepower

The Rocky Reach Visitor Center has stood on the west bank since 1962, by the PUD’s dating. A 2015 account of its mural dates the building’s construction to 1963. That mural is Horsepower, by Walter Graham, 16 by 35 feet. Dark horses fall through blue and green water and turn into a spray of white stallions. “We are constantly taking pictures of the visitors in front of the horse mural,” said Debbie Gallaher, visitor services manager. One visitor who came back after years away told her, “Here’s the thing I’ve never forgotten.”

Graham was born on November 17, 1903, on a small farm in Greenup, Illinois. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1922 and later illustrated the Sears catalog through Nugent-Graham Studios. He often visited his sister Clair in Wenatchee. In 1950 he decided to “retire for the first time,” bought an orchard outside town, and painted full time. His eight portraits of central Washington’s early peoples and settlers hung in the center’s theater, and his ice-age scene greeted visitors to the dam’s Museum of the Columbia. He died May 5, 2000.

By 2018 the PUD set out to remake the Visitor Center. Gallaher and outreach education specialist Bob Bauer had spent 14 years planning the change. The PUD’s own notice said little had changed since the opening, “when gas cost 30 cents a gallon and phones hung on the wall.” The center closed in November 2019, and the Museum of the Columbia in the powerhouse closed for good. Its tule house and ship’s wheel moved to the new center, and other pieces went to the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center. An antique Native canoe was crated and lowered on end through the skylight. “It was pretty nerve-wracking,” said Casey Hall, the PUD’s senior project manager.

The renamed Discovery Center reopened on August 25, 2021. Local news put the upgrade at $7.7 million; the contractor, Lydig, lists its project at $4.7 million. “We’ve been closed for two years, so people are excited about this,” Gallaher said.

The horses came down for the work. In September 2020 Roger Waterhouse taped a weak spot on the canvas, and the mural, which had hung by the staircase, went into storage. Later, people spoke to the board in favor of returning it to view:

• Graham’s niece, Denise Marker
• Russ Hepler, who had watched Graham paint it and wanted it shown as a historical record
• Terry Valdez, an artist and educator who had brought groups of young people to see it at the dam

Board member Randy Smith said the board had talked for years about not losing it.