A Brief Look At Billy Clapp Lake
The water held back by the Pinto Dam in Grant County near the town of Wilson Creek backs up to form Billy Clapp Lake. A popular lake with locals and area fishermen, Bill Clapp Lake is an integral part of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project.
Billy Clapp was a lawyer from Ephrata who during the early part of the 1900′s, along with Wenatchee World publisher Rufus Woods and James O’Sullivan (another Ephrata area attorney), were the most outspoken and main public backers of the Grand Coulee Dam project. Without the help of these brave forward thinkers, the North Central Washington area and all of the Columbia Basin may look much different today.
Billy Clapp Lake is accessible from the south from a county road that travels approximately a mile and a half north from highway 28. The north end of the lake is home to Summer Falls State Park (no camping facilities) and is south of Coulee City and Banks Lake.
View more pictures of Billy Clapp Lake.
View pictures of more of the rivers, lakes, and streams of North Central Washington.
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We were delighted to learn that a distant relative was involved in the Grand Coulee Dam and had a lake named after him. He was my wife’s (Sylvia Clapp) great uncle, the family knew very little about William M. Clapp other than he was born in 1877 in Adams, Wisconsin. Much of the fertilizer used on the land irrigated by the Columbia Basin project came from the fertilizer operation I managed for a number of years in Trail, BC.
We’ll visit Billy Clapp lake sometime in the near future.
Peter Hemmes
Vancouver BC