| |
by Tim Steury • Photography by Robert Hubner
Palouse Falls
The trail down into the canyon below Palouse Falls is loose talus,
poison oak, stinging nettles, and rattlesnakes. But mostly, it’s
steep, dropping quickly through a notch in the otherwise sheer basalt
walls of the canyon. Still, WSU geologist Gary Webster, at 70 the
oldest in our party, is the first to the bottom. In fact, he’s
already fishing before the next one of us arrives.
Webster is the picture of contentment, not only because of the anticipated
bass eyeing his fly. He is deep within his element. Although we’ve
dropped barely 400 feet in elevation from the canyon’s edge,
we’ve descended 12 million years in time.
The Palouse River at this point is about 60 feet across. The far
bank is thick with willow. Above it is a shelf of prairie sage and
arrowleaf balsamroot.
Upstream is a cloud of mist from the falls. The falls itself is
still hidden around a bend, but the roar of the river falling 180
feet fills the canyon.
The falls has diminished somewhat from the earlier spring runoff.
But even then, when it channels the melting snow and rain of the
late-winter Palouse, the falls is an insignificant drip compared
with the cataclysmic flow that created it, a mere 15,000 years ago.
In order to comprehend that extraordinary force, first consider
the basalt.
Above the shelf of sage and balsamroot are the upper flows of the
Columbia River basalts, the dense, black volcanic rock that underlies
much of southeastern Washington. About 18 million years ago, says
Webster between casts, the earth cracked, and great flows of lava
erupted, spreading from vents in eastern Washington, northeastern
Oregon, and Idaho across what is now the Columbia Plateau. (One of
those vents is exposed below the dorms on the south end of the Pullman
campus of Washington State University and can be traced all the way
to Davenport.) A succession of seven flows continued over the next
many million years. Some of these flows reached as far as the Pacific
Ocean. In fact, the basalt bluffs of the Oregon coast originated
from vents near Lewiston, Idaho. In some places, the basalt underlying
the region is 5,000 feet thick.
Continued  |
|
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Unnoticed, even unknown to many, the Channeled Scablands
is the latest manifestation of the region’s catastrophic
history. But in many ways it is not what it used to be.
Palouse Falls
Gary Webster (right) and Washington State
Magazine editor Tim Steury recover from descending 12 million
years from the rim of Palouse River Canyon. | |
