Wanderings in the Palouse...and points South

As an old, decadent sloat, I like to get motel rooms with water views.  Here, in the middle of the Eastern Washington desert, I present..the Best Western at Moses Lake!  Pic shot from my balcony, of course with adult beverage in hand.

Washtucna coulee, in SE Washington.  The Palouse River used to run through here, joining with the Columbia near Pasco.  The Missoula floods changed all that.

The floods diverted the Palouse south and east, so it flowed over the tableland into the Snake well upstream from modern Pasco.  Here is Palouse Falls.  Lovely.  Now imagine a roaring torrent of water flooding EVERYTHING in the picture, and bursting over the cliffs as mega rapids, something like at Dry Falls.  That was the Missoula flood scene...the floods carried more water than the flow of every modern river on earth combined.

This plaque tells the story.  Blow it up for more detail...and a look at how this site looked 15 thousand years ago...when the floodwater had started to recede!

Palouse canyon, downstream from the falls.  It only took about two thousand years for the floods to carve this canyon.  The current river has not added appreciably to it in 12 thousand years or so.  This site is of great geological significance, since it was here that J Harlan Bretz' flood theory finally won over his doubters, when they saw how the floods had gouged away the basalt. 

The plunge pool of Palouse Falls.  A legacy of the floods.  Not enlarged since.  Good sized waterfall...200 feet high.

The falls from above the top.  Notice the basalt spike in the upper left of the picture (blow pic up for best resolution).  In the previous pic you can see the basalt to the left of the top of the falls.  This was harder than normal rock that was not carried away by the floods.  Another couple of floods (there were over 50) and that rock might too have wound up downstream.

The confluence of the Palouse and the Snake.  At first, the floodwaters roared over cliffs at this spot, but over the course of a couple millennia, the basalt was eroded 10-12 miles north, to where the falls are today.

Wallula Gap, on the Columbia near the OR/WA border.  When the Missoula floods roared through here, the constriction of the terrain caused water to back up to the north of the gap.  An ancient, temporary lake, called Lake Lewis, formed on dozens of occasions.  It only lasted a few weeks at most before the floodwater drained through the gap.  At its peak, Lake Lewis extended to Yakima, close to 100 miles northwest of here.

Hat Rock is another piece of flood resistant basalt similar to that just to the left of the top of Palouse Falls.  It's now a pleasant Oregon state park.  Oregon does state parks very well...if you're traveling thru the state, stop and have a picnic at a state park...you'll enjoy it.

After another pleasant night at a nice riverfront motel in Boardman...good food too!- I continued south.  It wasn't long before I encountered these industrial raptors confronting a grain elevator near Lexington OR.

The Morrow county courthouse in Heppner OR.  The courthouse, built in 1902, survived a catastrophic flash flood in 1903 that killed 247 people, nearly a quarter of the town's population.

Geology to da max!  This is in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Eastern Oregon.  It was dicey in these parts during prehistory.  At the top of the pic are layers of basalt that erupted from the earth 61 times in about a million years ending 15 million years ago.  Each flow covered thousands of square miles with dozens or even hundreds of feet of lava.  Blow the pic up and see the layers...each layer is one flow.  The green rock in the foreground was laid down 29 million years ago when a superheated cloud of ash and gas swept into the area.  The hot material fused to form a hard rock layer.  Below and above this layer, many fossils have been found, and discoveries are ongoing.  But in the green layer, not much...most critters were incinerated during the cataclysm.

Painted Hills is another unit in the Fossil Beds NM.  The reddish layers are particularly high in iron content.

Another cool pic in the Painted Hills.  Central and Eastern Oregon are fascinating...geology and volcanology are big here, and the diversity of terrain, vegetation, and wildlife are awesome.  I love it here!