Exploring

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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On The Hunt For Fall

Fall is a great time to be in the woods. Nice temperatures, generally fewer people than summer, the bugs are fading, and if you get to the right spot, the trees are starting to show off. We don’t have a lot of aspen close to home, so if we were going to see any as they transitioned from green to gold we’d have to hit the road. Southeast Idaho seemed to be a good option, with a lot of aspen and even a chance to fill a deer tag, if we were lucky.

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