On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
frosty
The Grand Coulee below the dam and the area flooded by the dam are ancient river beds and part of the Channeled Scablands in Eastern Washington. This area has had some of the most extreme geologic changes of anywhere in the country. Volcanic eruptions covered over 100,000 square miles of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon with lava, with some layers of basalt 6,600 feet thick. During the Ice Age ice dams formed, blocking rivers and creating massive lakes. Lake Missoula was 2,000 feet deep and held 500 cubic miles of water, more than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.
Periodically, the ice dams broke and released the water from the lake in as few as 48 hours at up to 65 mph, a flood greater than 10 times the flow of all the rivers in the world. This process happened dozens of times, scouring canyons hundreds of feet deep.
One geologist, J Harlen Bretz, described the area: “Unparalleled in the whole wide world, scarcely even approached by any landscape of similar origin, are the Channeled Scablands on the Columbia River Plateau in Eastern Washington.” From his field work, in 1923 he proposed huge floods were the only thing that could have caused the landforms, a hypothesis rejected by the geologic establishment because there was no source for the prehistoric floods. It wasn’t until another geologist, J.T. Pardee, proposed the existence of glacial Lake Missoula that Bretz had a source for the floods.
It took decades for his theory to be accepted. He received the highest medal of the Geological Society of America in 1979, when he was 99 years old. He told his son “All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.” A good example of Planck’s Principle: Science advances one funeral at a time.
Grand Coulee Dam
Dry Falls Interpretive Center with the sheer drop from the parking lot. Dry Falls is at the heart of the Channeled Scablands. When the flows occurred the falls were 400 feet high and 3 1/2 miles wide, five times the width of Niagara Falls. I stopped there almost by accident but it was an eye-opener both in the landscape and the history of the geologic changes. Another place where the description of the history overwhelms the visuals.
Dry Falls, looking upstream. The cataracts cut the gaps.
Dry Falls looking downstream
At Dry Falls
Steamboat Rock. This was one of the few parts of the flood zone that resisted erosion with massive falls on either side. It was like Goat Island at Niagara Falls but massively scaled up.
Map of Channeled Scablands
Baud
Betty
Very interesting part of the country. I had no idea.
MagdaInBlack
I first learned about these mega-floods from…..Graham Hancock, which caused me to dig a little deeper. I find this history fascinating and I thank you for this post and photos.
Baud
Just saw this timely post on Reddit.
lowtechcyclist
@MagdaInBlack:
I was today days old when I first learned of them! If I’d have known of it 43 years ago, I’d have taken a side trip to look around, rather than heading straight from Seattle to Coeur D’Alene. (I drove across the country and back in the summer of 1983. Still the best trip I’ve ever taken.)
MagdaInBlack
@lowtechcyclist: Pretty cool stuff, ain’t it?
twbrandt
I never knew this existed. Thanks for the photos and the history.
stinger
Amazing — I love learning new things! Thanks!
Trivia Man
TIL, thanks. I spent many years in SLC so i knew of Lake Bonneville. Next time you are in SLC, notice the beaches halfway up the mountains on all sides. Sandy utah, about 500’ above the valley floor, is built in sandy beaches.
Melissa M
Geology is so cool! Thanks for the lesson!
Bard the Grim
If you want to find a couple years worth of YouTube viewing, check out Nick Zentner’s channel at youtube.com/@GeologyNick/videos. Many of those videos are dedicated to the ice age floods, with some visualizations (like the Ground Coulee floods, Lake Missoula going most of the way up the hills behind UofMontana) and lots of scraping stratigraphic exposures, hammering on rocks, and strolling among the amazing scenery.
JetsamPool
The Channeled Scablands are definitely on my list of places to visit. Fortunately they are mostly located on the 17 Ma Columbia River flood basalts, so I can tick those off my bucket list, too. The flood basalts are associated with the oldest eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot.
Nelle
You’ve educated me. I lived in Seattle for around nine years and made a few forays over the Cascades, but only had a vague idea about this region. Thanks for the clarity of your explanations.
CaseyL
Thank you for sharing these!
I’ve been low-key obsessed by the Channeled Scablands since I first learned about them. It’s not “just” the magnificence of the rock formations, it’s knowing they were formed in a matter of days – hours, even! – from the power of the water and ice floods.
Last April, my birthday present to myself was going out to Central Washington for a few days, and hiking Dry Falls State Park, Steamboat Rock, and Northrup Canyon. It was revelatory, some of the most beautiful rock walls and formations I’ve ever seen, and I intend to get back there and see some more, because there is so much more to see!
Where did you stay? I stayed in Wenatchee, which was fine but made for a very long drive to the trails! I’d be interested if you found someplace closer, what the accommodations were like. I’m thinking maybe Coulee City or Electric City next time…
Ol_Froth
IIRC, the same thing happened in the east when the glaciers retreated. There was a huge glacial lake in NW PA, and when the ice dam went, the resulting flow carved out the Slippery Rock gorge, and changed the flow of what’s now the Allegheny River from north to south.
rosalind
thanks for this. and yes, we in WA State are experiencing multiple evacuations due to rivers rising above flood levels. my phone keeps going off with more evacuation orders. an atmospheric river causing torrential rains combined with King Tides. scary.
frosty
@CaseyL: We stayed at the Coulee Playland Resort in Electric City, camping in our travel trailer. A nice enough place but nothing to write home about. Or take pictures of.
frosty
@Ol_Froth:I didn’t know that about PA. We were in Wisconsin Dells a few years ago and learned that area was also carved out from ice age floods.
frosty
@JetsamPool: Flood basalts caused a lot of, if not all of, the five Great Extinctions. I just read a great book about it: The Ends of the Earth: Volcanic Apocolypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past by Peter Brannen.
CaseyL
@frosty: I get such a kick out of the debate over whether the Chicxulub asteroid or the volcanism killed the non-avian dinosaurs.
“It was the asteroid!”
“No, they were already on the way out from the volcanoes!”
“Asteroid!”
“Volcanoes!”
…and then, like the old commercial, a voiceover announces, “Relax, kids! It was both!”
…though I dearly, dearly wish we had a finer-tuned timescale on the volcanism. Like, how bad were the effects, not after 100,000 years, but after the first 100 years?
There are GCC-deniers who know science, and their rationale is that the current warming is just another natural phenomenon, and we’re looking at it from the wrong scale. I’d like to be able to argue back that there simply isn’t enough volcanism happening now to account for the warming but it would help if I had some information about what warming was like in the first century of the Siberian Traps or the Deccan Traps eruptions.
JetsamPool
@frosty: Luckily the Columbia flood basalts were small compared to say, the Deccan Traps or the Siberian Traps or the Ontong-Java Plateau.
The eruption of the Siberian traps (Permo-Triassic extinction) was particularly bad because the lavas erupted through limestones, which release carbon dioxide when heated.
The Deccan Traps were pretty close to the antipode of the Chicxulub impact, so I always wondered if the dynamic stresses from the seismic waves contributed to the eruptions. The impact would have generated some ginormous surface waves rippling outward in a ring that would converge on the other side of the earth. Those ripples would momentarily reduce pressure on a magma chamber, gas could come out of solution in the magma, and if other conditions were favorable, an eruption would occur.
Emily68
Learn more! I‘ve read and enjoyed “Bretz’s Flood: The remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood”, by John Soennichsen.
JetsamPool
Flood basalts erupt on time scales of hundreds of thousands of years to maybe a million years, so the source magma chambers would have to be in place and close to eruption for something like seismic waves to trigger and eruption.
RaflW
Wow. BF and I have been to Washington & environs a few times. One trip we started-ended in Spokane (for a conference) but went east to Sandpoint, Glacier & so on. Didn’t realize how epic the areas just west and south of Spokane were!
frosty
@CaseyL: I think the book I referred to covered both those topics: the amount of warming and the speed of the vulcanism and ecosystem collapse. I need to buy it – it was fascinating.
And scary. The current warming is faster than the others and we’re on our way to killing the oceans which is essentially what wiped out the food chain, causing the extinctions. The book also ended with a speculation that humankind should get smarter and manage the CO2 levels. Up when the astronomical situation is going to put us into an ice age, down for the opposite. I don’t think we’ll ever be that smart.
StringOnAStick
Part of the scientific opposition to the idea of a huge flood creating the channeled scablands is that geologists had fought for years to get the Noah’s Flood myth out of the science, and this at first was an “oh, no, let’s not bring THAT topic up again” response to the concept. Aerial photography pretty much sealed the deal for acceptance though.
BigJimSlade
@Baud: That’s probably where I learned about this maybe a year or two ago. My mind is still blown.
BigJimSlade
Great post – amazing, mind-boggling stuff!
CaseyL
@frosty:
Well, you’ve sold one copy of the Brennan book :)
Timill
@frosty: The Ends of the World
Now added to one of my “To Buy” lists.
The Ends of the Earth was the original working title for the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Interstadial
Great post and thanks for posting this!
One difference between the eastern and western U.S. is that continental glaciers barely got south of the Canadian border out west, except in what’s now western Washington where they got south to Olympia. However, because of all the mountain ranges in the region, there were montane glaciers much farther south. Major ranges like the Cascades, Sierra, and Rockies had extensive glaciation in many areas, while pocket glaciers on high peaks ranged as far south as southern California and central Arizona.
Now that we’re in an interstadial period (a warmer period between major glacial advances), you can find signs of past glaciation on the landscape if you know what to look for. From an extremely long-term perspective we’re still in an ice age, just one of the ‘light’ portions where ice caps and glaciers are more limited. In a true greenhouse earth there would be no permanent ice at low elevations, not even at the poles.
Dan B
I’ve got connections to eastern / central Washington but have only been a couple times. Once we saw Cindi Lauper and Tina Turner at The Gorge, a natural amphitheater on top of a bluff on the east side of the Columbia Gorge north of Dry Falls near the town of Quincy which is becoming an AI hub. The Gorge has a breathtaking view over the Columbia Gorge. It’s 400+ feet deep and miles across, just vertical bare rock cliffs disappearing into the distance. It’s magnificent at sunrise and dusk, much less so at mid day. Ut rained at our concert but Tina kept going in her fringed mini-skirt and heels. Blue tarps appeared all over the several thousand people in the amphitheater. A tarp would glow from ‘interior light’ and then a cloud of fragrant smoke would follow. The Gorge ranks with Red Rocks as one 9f the most stunning natural concert venues in the country. Pretty good for a town famous for huge frozen pea warehouses. National groups appear there every year and Dave Matthew’s Band plays several concerts every Labor Day. The contrast between the hundred miles of dry coulees and the wet sections if the lower Girfe between Oregon and Washington is quite amazing. The floods backed up at the Tri-Cities and the Willamette Valley. They dropped loads of rich silt. At the nirth of the Willamette topsoil is 35 feet deep. At Eugene, 50 miles or so south, it’s eight feet deep. These floods have affected settlement and agriculture.
CaseyL
@Dan B:
I went on a wineries tour in Walla Walla last year, and one of the wineries (can’t remember which one) grew its grapes on land that is (they said) 15 feet deep in the rich soil that got scoured during the Ice Age floods and washed down the Columbia. They said it was one of the secrets of their wine.
It was during that trip I wondered if I’d lost my palette. I was never an obnoxious wine connoisseur, but I used to know my vintages and what to taste for. A couple years ago, though, I got out of the habit of drinking: didn’t swear off, no reason to; just lost interest in alcohol. So I couldn’t find any of the various “notes” on that trip: all the wine tasted the same. Except for the one I mentioned above, grown in all that rich acidic soil, which did have its own flavor. Problem is, I didn’t like it much!
Dan B
@CaseyL: There are huge variations in soil in addition to heat units, sun exposure, etc. in eastern/ central Washington. The jumbled terrain means one plot can be very different than others a few yards or miles away. It’s interesting to see vineyards a couple hundred feet above the Columbia that are on deep rich soil. The floods dropped soil as they receded. The Walla Walla area is another area far from the floods but erosion from the Blue Hills has left similar deep soils or deep rocky soils
Also Walter Clore at Prosser brought science into local winemakers which has homogenized some varietals. Dr. Clore would not be pleased.
JustRuss
Hereby nominated for a rotating tag.
Chris T.
Hell’s Canyon, between Idaho and OR/WA, is similar but cut by the drainage of Lake Bonneville.