Palouse Falls

Palouse Falls at Palouse Falls State Park, Washington.    Photo: B. Perry

N 46° 39.804 W 118° 13.425

A while back, I posted an article entitled “Dry Falls and Bretz’s Flood” about a sight I’d come across during a nation-wide road trip in 2005.  Dry Falls in Eastern Washington is what’s left of an ancient waterfall 3.5 miles wide and 400 feet high.  Though dry now, it is easy to visualize an enormous amount of water pouring over its lip.  Where did so much water come from?  And where did it go?  In the 1920’s, a geologist named J. Harlen Bretz hypothesized that Dry Falls and other features of the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington were carved by a massive flood during the last Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago.  In the 1930’s, U.S. Geological Survey geologist J.T. Pardee found the source of Bretz’s flood: ancient Glacial Lake Missoula which held as much as 500 cubic miles of water – about half the volume of Lake Michigan. The Lake formed behind a glacial ice dam that blocked the Clark Fork River.  When the dam broke, the water from Lake Missoula catastrophically crashed across Eastern Washington, carving coulees and waterfalls all the way to the Pacific Ocean. After many decades of ridicule by his colleagues, Bretz’s hypothesis proved to be correct.  In fact, geologists now say there wasn’t just one flood but many over the course of hundreds of years until the glacier that formed the ice dam retreated for good.

Dry Falls was carved by the Ice Age Floods.   Photo: B. Perry

This last June, I returned to Washington’s Channeled Scablands for another look.  My daughter and I drove around the region and visited Dry Falls, West Bar Giant Current Ripples, the Grand Coulee, Potholes Coulee, Frenchman Coulee, Drumheller Channels, the Wallula Gap, and slackwater rhythmites of Walla Walla Valley.  The most impressive ice-age flood site we visited was Palouse Falls in the southeast corner of the state. 

Streamlined Palouse Hills shaped by Ice Age Floods                  Photo:Tom Foster

Bunthorne in Devil's Canyon.  Photo: L. McElroy

When we left Kennewick that morning, we could tell it was going to be another hot one.  It had been in the high 90s all week; unseasonably hot and dry for Washington.  We crossed the Columbia River and followed Louis and Clark’s route up the Snake River.  Here and there, giant current ripples mark the passage of the Ice Age floods.  The road left the river and climbed above the high water mark of Lake Lewis, the temporary lake that formed during the floods behind Wallula Gap.  Even here, we could see streamlined palouse hills shaped by the floodwaters that flowed southwest from Spokane.  We took a short hike in Devil’s Canyon, an extraordinarily straight canyon carved along a fault line by the flood waters that spilled over from Washtucna Coulee to the north.    Devil’s Canyon was eerily quiet.  We hiked along the old railroad bed that runs the length of the canyon for an hour and we didn’t see another soul.

Stev Ominski paintings of Palouse Canyon
today and during the Ice Age Floods

After a short drive through more flood-ravaged terrain, we arrived at Palouse Falls State Park.  It’s a small park at the end of a five-mile-long gravel road with twenty or so camp sites and a parking lot for about thirty cars.  There are rest rooms but no food here.  However, the meagerness of the facilities of this little park belies the magnitude of its main attraction.  A few short steps from the parking lot, you are at the edge of an enormous bowl, 500 feet across.  Its sheer, black basalt cliffs drop 300 feet straight down to a flat floor below.  On the far side of the bowl is Palouse Falls, a beautiful waterfall that drops 198 feet from the upper canyon to the lower canyon.  After a few minutes looking at this pretty waterfall, you realize, like J. Harlan Bretz did, that the canyon is way too large to have been carved by this little river.  In fact, it was dug out by the huge torrent of the Ice Age floods.  The entire bowl would have been filled with water during the floods, carving out the soft basalt rock with the violent eddy below.

Palouse Canyon below the falls.  Photo: B. Perry

 As fine as the view of the waterfall is, the view of Palouse Canyon to the south is an even more spectacular.  Here, the flood waters cut through the basalt along a jagged fault line, resulting in steep cliffs at right angles to each other.  The Palouse River cuts back and forth across the floor of the canyon on its way to the Snake River.  The grandeur of this view rivals the classic views found in our favorite National Parks.  And yet here is it, at a dusty little state park in the middle of nowhere. 

The sights of the Ice Age Flood have a serious public relations problem.  I’m amazed how few people have ever heard of the Channeled Scablands or the Ice Age Floods – even in Washington.   On a tour of Grand Coulee dam, the tour guide asked “what natural formation contains Banks Lake?”  No one in the group of thirty people beside me, a Californian, knew the answer: the Grand Coulee.  I read a story about a geologist asking a café owner in Othello how to get to Drumheller Channels - about 10 miles away.  He’d never heard of them. With the exception of Dry Falls and Palouse Falls, my daughter and I had the Ice Age Flood sites we visited entirely to ourselves.  While the solitude was very peaceful, it makes me sad that so few people know about this.  But help is on the way!

Proposed Ice Age Floods Pathways (touring routes) and
possible locations for interpretive facilities
(figure prepared by Jones & Jones). 

An Ice Age Flood National Geologic Trail was established by Congress as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.  Still in the planning stages, the trail will connect the many Ice Age Floods sites found in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.  New facilities and upgraded existing facilities will enhance the educational and recreational enjoyment of these scenic areas.  Perhaps this effort will get more folks out to these amazing places.  I doubt that many families will plan their vacations around them like we did … but you never know.

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