Vantage Road SW closed due to rockslides
JOEL MARTIN | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 hours, 47 minutes AGO
A rock face in the Frenchman Coule area. Vantage Road Southwest, which serves the Frenchman Coulee Recreation Area, was closed Saturday morning due to danger of rockslides.
FILE PHOTO
Joel Martin has been with the Columbia Basin Herald for more than 25 years in a variety of roles and is the most-tenured employee in the building. Martin is a married father of eight and enjoys spending time with his children and his wife, Christina. He is passionate about the paper’s mission of informing the people of the Columbia Basin because he knows it is important to record the history of the communities the publication serves. | May 16, 2026 12:15 PM
QUINCY — Vantage Road Southwest, west of Silica Road above the Columbia River, is closed due to unstable rock faces and danger of rockslides, according to a statement from the Grant County Sheriff’s Office.
The road closed Friday night about 9 p.m. due to a rock slide, according to the GCSO. One lane reopened about two hours later but was closed again at 11:40 a.m. Saturday. Anybody who is in the Frenchman Coulee Recreation Center is being contacted and asked to evacuate the area.
The road will be closed until further notice, according to a GCSO release.
ARTICLES BY JOEL MARTIN
Vantage Road SW closed due to rockslides
QUINCY — Vantage Road Southwest, west of Silica Road above the Columbia River, is closed due to unstable rock faces and danger of rockslides, according to a statement from the Grant County Sheriff’s Office. The road closed Friday night about 9 p.m. due to a rock slide, according to the GCSO. One lane reopened about two hours later but was closed again at 11:40 a.m. Saturday. Anybody who is in the Frenchman Coulee Recreation Center is being contacted and asked to evacuate the area. The road will be closed until further notice, according to a GCSO release.
Repurpose old dishes into garden art
MOSES LAKE — Somewhere in everybody’s kitchen, there are dishes that just don’t match anything else in the house. So why not put them to work in the garden? “You can do it in any way, shape or form that you want to,” said Micha Goebig, PR and Communications Strategist for Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington. “You can use your own stuff or get it secondhand at (a thrift store).” Thrifted garden art from mismatched dishes is easy to put together; the only thing you need is super glue, Goebig said. She recently led classes in thrift art at Goodwill stores on the west side, she said. “Some people did art pieces, like mushrooms,” Goebig said. “They (had) a broken lamp, so they used that as the stem of the mushroom and then replaced the top with a nice bowl that they turned (upside down).”
Interest rates hold back home sales in the Basin, statewide
MOSES LAKE — High interest rates are slowing down sales in the Basin real estate market. The average monthly rate for a 30-year mortgage was 6.37% Tuesday, up from 6.30% a week ago but still lower than the 6.76% it was a year ago. The persistently high rates are slowing sales and forcing builders to scale down their offerings, Angel Garza, owner of Palos Verdes Homes, said last week at the opening of Palos Verdes’ Sand Hill development in Moses Lake. “We’re down to a $375,000, $385,000 home, so people can qualify,” Garza said. “We had to go down to a 1,200-square-foot home to make sure that we have product that people can actually finance because of the interest being so high.”