Steamboat Rock State Park occupies five thousand forty-three acres near the north end of Banks Lake in Washington’s Grand Coulee. Its central feature, Steamboat Rock, is an eight-hundred-foot basalt butte nearly surrounded by water, with a broad plateau of more than six hundred acres once used by nomadic Native American tribes and later by early settlers. The surrounding landscape was formed during the last ice age, when ice dams sent the Columbia River through the Grand Coulee and left the butte as an island in a temporary channel before catastrophic floods carved the Scablands. Today the park is a year-round destination for shoreline recreation, trails, and winter sports.