From Washington To You
A boat on Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake with basalt shores in the distance.
Photograph by the National Park Service. Public domain.

From Washington to you

Lake Roosevelt

Lake Roosevelt · Lincoln County · reservoir completed 1941

The reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam is officially Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, a long pool NPS says is the largest reservoir in the Pacific Northwest.

Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area follows the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam. NPS calls the water body Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake. The park brochure says it is the largest reservoir in the Pacific Northwest and stretches 133 miles from Grand Coulee Dam to Onion Creek, 16 miles south of the United States–Canada border.

NPS says the park manages more than 300 miles of publicly accessible shoreline. Dam construction began in 1933 and finished in 1941. In 1946 the Secretary of the Interior approved a three-party agreement among the Bureau of Reclamation, the Office of Indian Affairs, and the National Park Service.

The recreation area is a water park first: boating, fishing, camping, and swimming along a narrow, fluctuating pool. The sources below are the National Park Service Lake Roosevelt pages.

  • Geography & Geology
  • History

Sources (2)

Last reviewed: September 20, 2026

Keep wandering

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    Banks Lake

    Reclamation's equalizing reservoir for the Columbia Basin Project sits behind the Feeder Canal from Grand Coulee, the first stop for irrigation water heading south.

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    Chief Joseph

    Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt led the Wallowa band. After the 1877 flight he was refused a return to Oregon and died on the Colville Reservation on September 21, 1904.

  • same arc

    Columbia Basin Project

    Reclamation's irrigation project now serves about 671,000 acres in east-central Washington, roughly two-thirds of the land Congress authorized in 1943.

  • same park

    Fort Spokane

    The Army built a fort above the Spokane–Columbia confluence in 1880. After the garrison left, the same buildings became a boarding school and then a hospital.

  • nearby

    Grand Coulee Dam

    A Depression-era dam turned the Columbia into irrigation, power, and a 151-mile lake.

  • same park

    Kettle Falls Fishery

    NPS calls the drowned falls an inland-Northwest center for more than 9,000 years. Tribes speared and netted thousands of salmon—enough, the park says, for half a year’s diet.