The tunnels under Park Lake C

About a mile and a third south of Coulee City, the Main Canal of the Columbia Basin Project disappears underground. Twin barrels — the Bacon Siphon and Bacon Tunnel — carry the water beneath the high ground east of the Grand Coulee, then daylight it again on the far side, where it continues to Billy Clapp Lake and splits into the canals that water the basin.

Essentially all of the roughly 671,000 acres the Columbia Basin Project serves — the largest irrigation project in Washington and one of the largest in the country — receives water that has passed through these two conduits. There is no alternate route. When the Bureau of Reclamation describes the project, this is the neck of the funnel.

In September 2025, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation filed three applications under Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program asking DNR to transfer roughly 12,900 acres of state trust land near Park Lake out of state ownership. Our analysis of the applicants’ own parcel files shows that about 6,650 feet of each tunnel barrel — well over half its length — runs directly beneath the parcel called Park Lake C.

What the tubes are

The original siphon and tunnel were built between 1946 and 1950 under a Reclamation contract awarded to T. E. Connolly, Inc. for $3,494,470 — about $57.7 million in 2025 dollars by the consumer price index (heavy construction costs have risen faster, so the true replacement figure is higher). The siphon runs 1,038 feet; the tunnel 10,045 feet; both are 22 feet in diameter.

They were deliberately built at half capacity, with provisions for a second barrel. Getting that second barrel took three decades of political effort: Congress and the Bureau of the Budget fought over it through the 1960s, the Washington Legislature put in $15 million in 1975, Congress added funding in 1976 — and in March 1977 President Carter put the project on his water- projects “hit list” before Senators Jackson and Magnuson restored it. Water first flowed through the second siphon and tunnel on March 22, 1980.

The tunnels are federal infrastructure, owned by the Bureau of Reclamation. The land above them, in Sections 9 and 16 of Township 24 North, Range 28 East, is Washington common-school trust land — verified against DNR’s own public GIS. Section 16 is a classic statehood school section. What instrument gives Reclamation its right-of-way through that state land, and what happens to that right-of-way if the land above changes hands, are questions we have put on our public-records request list.

The land above them

The Park Lake parcels sit in the shrub-steppe between Sun Lakes–Dry Falls State Park and the ground the King family ranched for decades. The family held a DNR grazing tenancy going back roughly 68 years, under a lease that ran through 2029 — until DNR terminated it in January 2023, shortly before the Department of Ecology fined the Kings $267,540 over excavation at 23 alkali wetland sites near Park Lake. The Kings are contesting both actions in court; the termination’s validity is an open question in active litigation, and DNR’s own transfer analyses describe the parcels as “unleased.”

Our geometry analysis of the enforcement record and the applications finds that 18 of the 23 wetland sites named in Ecology’s administrative order fall inside the boundaries of the three Park Lake transfer parcels — a figure we will re-verify against the application maps as documents are confirmed.

The process has no hearing in it

Under the Trust Land Transfer program as codified by HB 1460 in 2023, no public hearing is required at any step — unlike ordinary DNR land exchanges, which require published notice and a hearing by statute. Public input on the 2027–29 applications came through a comment window DNR opened as a matter of practice, which closed April 15, 2026. The applications were scored by an advisory committee whose members rate parcels privately, on criteria that weight tribal support and public benefits most heavily. The prioritized list goes to the Board of Natural Resources and then to the Legislature, which decides what to fund in the capital budget.

An application is not a transfer. Nothing has been conveyed, and the Legislature has not acted on this cycle. But the questions an application like Park Lake C raises — who controls the surface above the basin’s water supply, what encumbrances travel with the land, what access Reclamation retains for inspection and repair, and what happens if the land later moves into federal trust status, as the applicants have said they intend to seek — deserve answers on the record before the decision is made, not after.

What we don’t know yet

Honesty about the limits of the record: the tunnel alignment we measured against is mapped from public data, not Reclamation as-builts; the parcel boundaries are reconstructed from the applications; and the Reclamation right-of-way instrument has not yet been produced. Each of those is the subject of a pending or planned public-records request, and this article will be updated — with a change log — as documents arrive.

Sources

• Bureau of Reclamation, The Columbia Basin Project (project history): construction dates, contracts, dimensions, capacities, 1980 second-barrel completion — usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/pubs/cbhistory.pdf
• Bureau of Reclamation, Columbia Basin Project page: ~671,000 acres served
• WA DNR, Proposed and Current Transfers (retrieved 2026-08-11): application list, comment period, advisory committee schedule
• RCW 79.17.300–.310 (SHB 1460, 2023) and the DNR TLT Program Manual: process steps, no statutory hearing; RCW 79.17.050: hearing requirement for land exchanges
• WA DNR public GIS (Managed Lands service): trust-land status of T24N R28E Secs. 9 & 16
• Ecology Administrative Order #21543 / Notice of Penalty #21544 (Feb 2023); Capital Press (Mar 2024) and Spokesman-Review (Mar 2026): lease termination, penalty, litigation posture
• Applicants’ Park Lake A/B/C parcel files (filed Sept 2025): boundaries, acreages; our geometry analysis of tunnel overlap and enforcement-site containment (methods available on request; pending confirmation against Reclamation as-builts and application maps)