Drove 3 hours from Spokane to Walla Walla today. I saw a bunch of things that I thought were
interesting enough that they tickled my muse.
Sunrise over the high plateaus of the channeled scablands.
The picture really doesn’t do this justice. It was really breathtaking.
But there is another thing about these pictures, other than
the inherent blurriness caused by taking them as I was be-bopping down the road
at 70, and that is how flat and barren the land is.
These are wheat fields that I’m driving by, with a coat of
frost on them (hence the light color).
To the untrained eye, it might look like I’m in Kansas, not Washington,
but a common misconception about Washington is that it is green, rainy, and
covered in trees.
It’s called the Evergreen State, for goodness sake, so I’ll
forgive your ignorance
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The Eastern half of the state is affected by
what is known as a rain shadow. A rain
shadow is caused by mountains, forcing heavy, laden clouds to drop all of their
moisture on the windward side, so that by the time they get to the leeward
side, there is none left. What this
means to our state is that on one side, it is lush, rainy, and green, while on
the other side, there is honest-to-goodness, no kidding sage brush desert. This mean that on the west side, Washington
contains the only rainforests that exist in the lower 48 states, while on the
East side, we’ve got climates varying from highland steppes, to lowland desert,
to high alpine, to ponderosa forests like Northern California.
The very middle of the Columbia Basin is flat, almost like
Kansas. The only real difference is that
our flatlands are pock marked and torn by the channeled scablands.
This is Palouse Falls. I drove right by this this morning.
The channeled scablands have an interesting history. The channels, also known as coulees, were
created by water flowing through the area.
Lots of water. The water came
from a series of several floods caused by Lake Missoula emptying itself several
times over the course of thousands of years at the end of the last Ice Age.
“But wait, Goober!” I hear you saying, “there is no such lake!”
Not anymore, there isn’t.
But back in the day, Lake Missoula was a huge lake that covered parts of
Northern Idaho and most of Western Montana.
It was huge.
The lake was formed when glaciers created an ice dam and
allowed the Clark Fork River, one of the larger tributaries of the Columbia
River, back up behind it. You can still
see the beachlines in the high hills in parts of Montana, where there are lines
of beach rock ringing the hills.
See the beachlines?
As you can imagine, even during an ice age, a dam made of
ice holding back that much water is not exactly the most permanent of
structures. No one is quite sure how
many times the dam let loose over the years, but let loose, it did, with
catastrophic effect.
Walls of water hundreds of feet high, moving hundreds of
miles an hour roared through the Columbia basin. They scoured out new channels, changed the
route of the Columbia river, and denuded the scablands areas of all of their topsoil. The scablands area is a strange place. There are levels of lava bedrock from back
when the Yellowstone Hotspot was under eastern Washington and was erupting lava
instead of geysers as it does today. These
have been scoured out to create deep chasms and high table grounds, producing
some of the strangest and most difficult to navigate terrain I’ve ever
seen. I do a lot of pheasant hunting in
the scablands, so I’ve grown to love them.
Yeah, that's a waterfall, folks
The largest waterfall on Earth existed for a short time
during these floods. It now exists as Dry
Falls State Park. I’ve been there, and I
can tell you first hand, if that fall ever had water going over it, it was an
absolutely spectacular site to see.
Strangely enough, while this destroyed the scablands as
fertile ground, it created one of the most fertile places on Earth – the Palouse
region in south eastern Washington. The
scoured topsoil collected in backwaters, and then unprotected, and with no
vegetation to stabilize it, the topsoils blew on the winds and collected on the
Palouse. The windblown loess soil in the
Palouse is as deep as 40 feet. It
creates very steep, rolling hills that are some of the best dryland wheat,
rape, lentil, pea, and chick pea growing areas anywhere on Earth. The quality
of the soil is such that despite the dry conditions, no irrigation is
needed. I went to college in the Palouse
(GO COUGS!) and largely grew up there, since most of my extended family is from
that region.
I crossed the Snake River twice today. I miss that river. I really need to get my boat out.
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