Washington

Touring the Ice Age Floods of Washington, Part 2

After an evening watching the sandhill cranes, and a night of listening to coyotes we were back on the road from Potholes Reservoir heading north to see more pieces of the Ice Age Floods puzzle. Our first stop of the day was the Ephrata Fan. We were essentially working ‘upstream’ following the floods, and the Ephrata Fan is an alluvial fan of sorts where massive debris settled after being ripped out of the basalt as the Grand Coulee was formed. There is a mixture of house size basalt rocks and Volkswagen sized granite boulders spread out for miles across the fan. Yet another testament to the power and volume of water that these floods contained.

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Touring the Ice Age Floods of Washington, Part 1

Driving around eastern Washington, I’ve always been a bit confused. Some of the landforms and supposed drainages just don’t make sense. It turns out there is a reason for that. Massive ice age floods shaped the region with forces and water at levels that are impossible to comprehend. I can only imagine the reaction when the geologist J. Harlan Bretz proposed that these features were shaped by a series of massive floods. The amount of water and the speed at which is flowed is just simply at a scale of nothing that has ever been observed. He put the pieces together and along with the discovery of the existence of prehistoric lake Missoula that existed during the past ice age, the geology community finally came to accept his theory as fact.

After a lot of our own research, and putting some pins in the map, we came up with a trip plan and set out to see the pieces of the Ice Age Flood puzzle for ourselves.

Canyon downstream from Palouse Falls
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San Juan Islands, 2022

There’s a few good reasons why we haven’t been to the San Juan Islands in Washington. The main one being the huge obstacle in the way of getting there, also known as Seattle. The other being that well, they are islands. Typically we’d truck camp to a destination like this but the extra step of ferrying to multiple islands made this an item that barely made the list of places to consider visiting. Then in 2021 we purchased our 16 foot Hewes Craft, also known as the Red Baron. All the sudden a visit seemed pretty intriguing and it got bumped up the list several slots. Our window for this exploratory trip was a week in June, we packed the boat and headed north. After a night in Washington Park in Anacortes we launched off into the salt for a week of adventure.

James Island Camp

Our first stop was James Island. The original plan was a much more distant island, but with a small craft warning in effect we made the short hop over to James. There was one boat there upon arrival but they soon left and we had the place nearly to ourselves. After reading about James we worried about racoons raiding camp, but it seems that issue may be in the past.

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