A soul-searching journey—with camera—into Washington’s mystic scablands, now available in bookstores and via mail order.

Nine years ago, I began wandering into a broken landscape with a heavy heart and a camera. For the most part, the ground mirrored how I felt at the time: overwhelmed and torn apart; wobbling with loss and grief.

Blessedly, I began to notice something that is as ironic as it is redemptive. The forces that obliterated the landscape had also opened it up to veins of wilderness and an archipelago of natural cathedrals, many of which are beyond the reach of paved roads. I’m unashamed to admit I’ve needed these places—where meadowlarks sing—to gather myself.

With only a thin layer of topsoil, the rocky terrain cannot be tilled to grow wheat. Strangely enough, though, there is water, especially in late winter and spring. Whereas deep soils in nearby tracts of our region’s famous Palouse hills absorb rain and snow-melt like a sponge, the gouged and cratered earth is braided with ephemeral streams and pockmarked with year-round, natural lakes, some of which are miles long. It is just enough water to nourish a web-like network of wetlands that only took shape in the last 20,000 years or so in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains to the west. It is just enough moisture to nourish green, riparian ribbons and hidden pockets of wilderness.

The dramatic and ravaged terrain exists because a barely imaginable natural catastrophe marked the last throes of the Wisconsinan ice age in the Pacific Northwest. Cataclysmic floods exploded through failing ice dams, washing away vast dunes of loessial soil and leaving distinctly carved bedrock and cratered terrain. A subregion of rolling, fertile hills—as in today’s Palouse—was profoundly excavated by floodwaters—deeper than Seattle’s Space Needle is high—moving at highway speeds.

These waves of destruction seem unbelievable. And for a time they were, even though a brave and gifted geologist—J Harlen Bretz—had produced ample field evidence, by 1923, for his catastrophic flood theory.

Rather than being celebrated, though, Bretz was mocked. It took a half century for him to be vindicated and, at the age of 96, to finally be awarded the Penrose Medal, the highest honor in American geology. I learned about Bretz’s story in 1977 when I was studying geology at Washington State University and his persistence and vindication has been an inspiration to me ever since.

Like my mother and my older sister I am from here: born on the bed of ancient Lake Lewis that formed in the Pasco basin at the height of the ice age floods. The flood-scoured landscape became known to immigrant pioneer settlers as the scablands. It is as quiet as it is remote, but it is not frozen in time. When my life was being upended, I was drawn into this seemingly bleak and sparsely-populated expanse. I wanted to be alone, but also to walk and climb where I imagined Bretz’s bootprints to be. On days I was too heartsick to speak or write, I could at least use my camera to bottle the light from places that offer a quality of solace not easily described with words.

A result of this sojourn is Beautiful Wounds, the photography for which has accrued over the years, and the writing of which I finished a few days after my mother passed away in December of 2019. The story moves through time, and at the pace of a good hike through the maze of landscape that Bretz and his intrepid students successfully measured and deciphered. The full title is Beautiful Wounds: A Search for Solace and the Light in Washington’s Channeled Scablands. It is being published by The Countryman Press, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company, and will be released on May 10th of this year.

Available on order at the following booksellers:

Aunties books, Spokane

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Indiebound

Apple Books

W.W. Norton

Below–Sampler of photography from Beautiful Wounds
tjc