Like most years, the season came slowly and then all at once.
T-shirts are back. Everyone suddenly has cool sunglasses. Fans are blowing, birds are chirping, mountain snow is melting, and in downtown Spokane, the waterfalls are roaring.
It sounds like an airplane jet, or endless thunder. You can hear it all around, even while standing next to traffic on the Monroe Street Bridge more than a hundred feet in the air. The falls' gentle winter stream is gone. In its place: pure aquatic power.
In this first week of May, more than 10,000 cubic feet of water are passing over the falls every second. A cubic foot is roughly the size of a basketball, so picture 10,000 basketballs bouncing over the falls. Every second. After two and a half seconds, that's enough balls to equip every person who competed in Hoopfest last year.
And we aren't even at peak flow yet.
As temperatures climb and mountain snow continues to melt, the flow will keep rising. By around May 10, the flow will start to peak at just over 20,000 cubic feet of water per second.
"What you see out there today, it'll be even more amazing," says Meghan Lunney, a river license manager with Avista, which operates several dams along the river, including at the upper and lower Spokane Falls.
During years of record snow and rainfall, the flow can get as high as 40,000 cubic feet per second, Lunney says. But that only happens every decade or so, and this year's peak is expected to be pretty standard.
The flow will remain strong throughout May before tapering down in early June. In September, the falls will shrink back down to a gentle stream of less than a thousand cubic feet per second and settle down for a long quiet winter.
Come spring, they'll explode once more.
There's something mesmerizing about the falls in peak flow that makes people want to stop and watch. Part of it lies in the natural beauty, but there's also something deeper — a sense of smallness and connection to the region's past.
"It's that kind of amazing timelessness you get when you look at the ocean or you look at the stars," says Jerry White, the Spokane Riverkeeper. "It's something really bigger than ourselves and deeply motivating."
For thousands of years, tribal groups from the Inland Northwest gathered at the falls to fish for salmon. Warren Seyler, a historian with the Spokane Tribe of Indians, says oral traditions describe the river being so full of salmon, it seemed like you could walk on their backs from one side to the other.
"It was our lifeblood," Seyler says. "People today can't even imagine the magnitude of what a great fishery it was."
It wasn't just the Spokane Tribe — people from the Kalispel and Coeur d'Alene tribes, the confederated Colville tribes, and others would also travel to the falls to fish there. It was a reciprocal relationship, Seyler says. Tribes from other areas would ask permission to fish there, understanding that members of the Spokane Tribe would later ask to take berries or roots from their land.
When Europeans came, they built fish wheels and commercial fishing operations downstream of the falls that scooped the salmon from the river. By the late 1800s, the salmon stopped coming to the falls.
The falls represented food and sustenance for the local tribes, but for the newcomers, Spokane Falls represented water power. The white settlers built flour mills and sawmills and in 1890, Washington Water Power, now called Avista, built a dam to generate electricity for the city.
The city continued to grow, and by the 1960s, the falls were surrounded by a tangle of railroad lines, parking lots and industrial waste. The water was heavily polluted.
It's taken a lot of work to wind back the damage.
The 1974 World's Fair saw the railroad tracks and parking lots removed. Further collaboration between state and local agencies helped remove many of the pollutants from the river.
Throughout the 20th century, Avista-operated dams on the Spokane River would divert water from the falls and often leave them dry during the summer months. In 2009, the Sierra Club and the Center for Environmental Law & Policy reached a settlement with Avista that required the utility company to maintain a year-round flow.
As part of the work to restore water flow, Avista installed a number of weirs to more evenly spread the water. The weirs are painted and shaped to resemble the falls' natural rock foundation — preserving the aesthetics was important, Lunney says.
The falls are beautiful, but they're also deeply dangerous. That might be part of the appeal.
"We're so small with respect to the forces of nature, and the falls bring that home. There's this intense danger and risk," White says. "The fact that you can observe that and be safe, it excites a wonderment."
For a handful of people, it's not enough to just observe from a distance. The pull of the falls is just too strong.
During the 1974 World's Fair, 25-year-old Terry Brauner braved the upper falls wrapped in three inner tubes tied together, which trapped and nearly killed him. He was rescued near the Washington Water Power station.
Brauner tried again in June of that year, but was stopped by police. The Associated Press reported that he was arrested for breaking a law against swimming in that part of the river, which was passed in response to his earlier attempt to float the falls.
Decades earlier, in 1927, a logger named Al Faussett rode over the upper Spokane Falls in a hollowed-out spruce log named Skykomish Queen. The event was heavily publicized, and the Spokesman-Review reported that between 20,000 and 40,000 people turned out to watch.
Strangely, authorities didn't try to stop him. Police Chief Angus McDonnell called it a "hare-brained stunt," but still assigned a detail of officers to manage crowds. When Faussett became stuck in a whirlpool ahead of the plunge, police tossed him a rope to help pull his craft back on track.
Despite the crowd's shouts of "He's a goner," and "He won't make it," Faussett survived the upper falls. He had planned to continue over the lower falls, but the first drop left him injured, exhausted and unable to maneuver his boat. Bystanders pulled him to safety and took him to the hospital.
The Skykomish Queen went over the lower falls without him and smashed into 100 pieces.
The falls' power in the face of human fragility can make them seem immortal, but they're not. As our combustion of fossil fuels continues to warm the earth, Spokane Falls — like everything else on our planet — faces very real danger.
White says warmer winters are projected to shift the falls' peak flows to earlier in the year. Instead of May, we could start seeing peak flows in April, March and one day even February. Reduced snowfall would also lead to smaller overall flows.
It's already happening. Since the 1980s and '90s, scientists have observed a noticeable shift in Spokane River water flows trending earlier in the year, White says.
"This can no longer just be attributed to bad luck of hot weather," White says. "We're watching a macro climate change driven by ocean temperatures changing."
That has big implications. Less cold mountain runoff and higher daytime temperatures would "tilt the ecological playing field," White says. Native bull fish and trout would struggle while invasive species like small mouth bass and pike would take over.
The threat is very real, but it's not inevitable. The falls have come back from the brink before.
The railroad tracks are gone, along with many of the water pollutants. Tribal groups continue to hold annual powwows at the falls and, after an extended absence, the water now flows year-round. Efforts are also underway to reintroduce salmon to the river.
"Just seeing the falls continues to ignite that fire," says Seyler, with the Spokane Tribe. "That free flowing water, seeing it helps keep the spark alive that someday the salmon will return. To us, there's no doubt in that." ♦
Editor’s note: This article was updated on May 11 to clarify that fish wheels were built downstream of the falls. Historical evidence indicates salmon were unable to pass above the falls.
