National and regional award-winning journalist, photographer, and activist (Hanford, Spokane River, regional clean air issues, national nuclear weapons and waste policy). Former senior editor Camas Magazine, former client and communications director, Center for Justice, Spokane.
Owing to a freakishly wet late spring, it was only near the very end of June that the Spokane River became safe enough to take on. I don’t swim with a life jacket or a wetsuit. But I do swim with a camera, a fuchsia cap– to alert boarders and kayakers and rafters– plus earplugs and goggles of course, so I can see what I’m getting myself into.
The least that can be said for the results is they are thirty medicinal images for the grayer days ahead, that will help keep seasonal affective disorder at bay. The cobbles and boulders radiating in these photographs are dominantly the rocks delivered by the catastrophic ice age floods of the late Pleistocene that brought in splendid pieces of Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia. Among my favorites are Cosmos, The Brightness of Being, and Whence it Came, the latter of which frames the opening for this on-line gallery.
Part of the experiment this summer was to attempt photographs that capture the elements in the surrounding environment–the water, the rocks, the sky, and the riparian landscape. You’ll see the results of that in photos like All in, Dances in Orange, and even Crawfish Cinema, where the figures on the wave screen are from the light entering from the sky, trees and buff hillside in the distance.
Parenthood was inspired by one of my daughter’s poems which begins with a line about my teaching her to swim. The location of the photo has added meaning for me because it’s near where I spread my allotment of my father’s ashes two years ago. So, yes, there’s a lot going on there beneath the surface.
It bears repeating that all this work, and previous efforts from the river, come with my deep appreciation for all of those who’ve worked and continue to work to restore and protect this precious resource in our midst. Special thanks this year to the late Mike Taylor, a venerable engineer and community leader who was heading up the city’s wastewater treatment improvements at the time of his passing. I was honored to count him among my friends.
Each of these photos is available on metal starting at $1 per square inch, (e.g. $256 for a 16×16 print ready for wall mounting) with a 30% discount on additional prints through December 1, 2020. For sale inquiries, please call (509) 838-4580, or email me at tjccamas@comcast.net.
How the devastation of the ice age floods shaped Spokane and still deliver its most important natural resource.
When I was at Washington State University in the late 1970s, my journalism professor, Chuck Cole, would often refer to Spokane as “Camelot.” As a salty realist who worked on the copy desk of the Spokane Daily Chronicle during the summers, Chuck said “Camelot” as though he’d just sipped a gin & tonic that was missing the gin. He did not offer it as a compliment.
I didn’t quite understand what he was getting at, at least not at first.
But what Professor Cole meant is that the ownership of Spokane’s newspapers by the preeminent Cowles family—with its civic prominence and extensive real estate investments in the city—often discouraged clear-eyed journalism about how the city actually worked, or didn’t work. Consequently, what prevailed was a sanitized version of life in the city, one frequently at odds with Spokane’s actual power dynamics and actual history. “Camelot” was just Chuck’s way of capturing it all with one breath and a priceless facial expression.
Whether the foibles, crimes, remedies and triumphs in Spokane’s past are all that different from those in the histories of other American cities is beyond my purview, at least for this exercise. But geology and human history do meet at the Spokane falls. It’s clear that the city as we know it was built upon gifts delivered by ice age floods. It’s equally clear that the city spent the first chapters of its urban history recklessly despoiling those assets. Undoing those early mistakes has, in turn, become a laudable, modern success story; one that is still underway.
The signature gorge was largely sculpted by what J Harlen Bretz began referring to as the “Spokane Flood” based upon his geologic field work in the early 1920s. Bretz wasn’t exactly sure what unloosed the inland tsunami of glacial floodwaters. But he knew, for certain, that the torrent had plowed through what is now Spokane, and spilled out, from there, to create the channeled scablands.
Spokane River leaving the river gorge west of Spokane.
Spokanites, for the most part, don’t think of themselves as living in the flood-ravaged scablands. That’s likely because the city’s robe of pine forests and mountain views to the north and east don’t at all resemble our image of the scablands as treeless and parched. But the evidence of the ice age floods pulverizing visits abound. If, for example, you’ve gotten frustrated driving on the South Hill because roads suddenly terminate at duplex-sized basalt mounds, you’ve come face-to-face with the chaotic zoning legacy of Lake Missoula floodwaters. And yet the rock smashing floods also delivered what turned out to be invaluable gifts.
The first is the city’s namesake river. It’s not that the river didn’t exist before the Lake Missoula outwash floods. It did. But the geologic evidence is that it flowed well to the north of what is now downtown Spokane through what geographers call the Hillyard Trough. The loads of debris dumped into the trough by the Lake Missoula floodwaters effectively shoved the river miles to the south, thus setting the stage for the creation of the city’s signature natural feature, not just the braided falls but the gorge beyond.
Lake Missoula outwash cobbles on the Spokane River riverbed.
Spokane was founded as the town of Spokane Falls in 1881. At inception, the city’s namesake river was an obvious resource both as a source of drinking water and a healthy fishery. Yet it was soon degraded by pollution and unbridled development.
A quarter century later Spokane’s park board commissioned the nationally prominent Olmsted Brothers to evaluate the rapidly growing city’s need for adequate park properties. In their report back, the brothers all but pleaded with city leaders to protect the scenic river gorge extending miles downstream from the falls. In their report the Olmsteds chided Spokane for the improvements (they put quotation marks around the word “improved” to register their sarcasm) that were already encroaching and diminishing this “tremendous feature of the landscape.”
Spokane River in the Spokane Valley east of Spokane with the mountains of Idaho in the distance.
The signature gorge was largely sculpted by what J Harlen Bretz referred to as the “Spokane Flood” based upon his geologic field work in the early 1920s. Bretz wasn’t exactly sure what unloosed the inland tsunami of glacial floodwaters. But he knew, for certain, that the torrent had plowed through what is now Spokane, and spilled out, from there, to create the channeled scablands.
In the century since Bretz set forth his Spokane Flood theory, geologists have found evidence that each of the cataclysmic breaches of the Lake Missoula ice dam near present-day Clark Fork, Idaho, opened the icy floodgates for approximately 500 cubic miles of water. The main pathway for the unloosed torrents was the Rathdrum Prairie to the southwest, where flood depths are estimated to have reached 700 feet, higher than two football fields stacked on end. The lion’s share of that water headed right for Spokane.
There is an important footnote to the Spokane Flood story, and I’ll place it here. Geologists are now persuaded that many, if not most, Lake Missoula flood events occurred during periods when Spokane was already under water as a result of ice lobes blocking the Columbia or the Spokane rivers. This means there would have been at least several events when the Lake Missoula floodwaters were suddenly added to existing glacial lakes that would have dramatically overflowed and sent floodwaters surging into the eastern tracts of the channeled scablands.
In the Spokane Valley, Lake Missoula floodwaters reached at height of 2,800 feet, nearly high enough to reach the 3,000 foot summit of the thumb-like “Big Rock” that is popular with elite climbers. Trying to envision floodwaters reaching the ridge below Big Rock and overflowing it is mind-bending, to say the least.
The scale of the great floods’ earthly remodeling in and around Spokane tests the imagination. One popular place to experience it is where my mom was standing when my dad took a photo of her in August of 1954. The two were in Spokane on their honeymoon and visited the “Bowl & Pitcher” on the Spokane River, three miles west of downtown.
In the photo, she stands atop a six-story-high gumdrop of Grande Ronde basalt. Above the river behind her are rock walls that climb more than 600 feet to the crest of rimrock just west of Palisades Park. The floodwaters didn’t just top the rimrock high above the river, they stormed over. One result is that the plateau landscape in Palisades Park is classic scabland terrain, with turrets of exposed basalt and just enough topsoil accrued over the past 12,000 years or so to support loose stands of pines, shrubs, and wildflowers.
Another place to challenge your imagination is at the high ridge line at the Rocks of Sharon in the Dishman Hills Natural Area in the Spokane Valley, an area that received the full force of the Lake Missoula torrents. The Rocks of Sharon consist of ancient gneiss and granite—many millions of years older than the surrounding basalt—that were crested by the floodwaters. The floodwaters reached a height of 2,800 feet, nearly high enough to reach the 3,000 foot summit of the thumb-like “Big Rock” that is popular with elite climbers. Trying to picture floodwaters reaching the ridge below Big Rock and overflowing it is a bit mind-bending, to say the least.
“Big Rock” at the Rocks of Sharon near the crest of the Dishman Hills Natural Area.
Down at river level, in west Spokane, another astounding glacial flood feature is hidden in plain view. These are enormous bars of gravels and cobbles deposited by the Lake Missoula floods as the floodwaters completely overwhelmed the river gorge. What disguises them is a layer of topsoil that supports grass and pines, hawthorn and willow. But just under the veneer of soil are the billions and billions of small boulders, cobbles and gravels dropped by the floods.
The boulders and cobbles are brilliantly exposed in the Spokane River, and spectacularly so at my summer swimming hole near the City’s Downriver Golf Course.
Almost all of the vast cobble pile extending fifty miles toward Sandpoint, Idaho, is now saturated with cold, naturally purified water. We know it as the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie aquifer, the City of Spokane’s sole source of drinking water.
Above cobbles and boulders in the river bed, a massive flood bar at the “Big Eddy” in west Spokane.
This stretch of river—which my friends and I know as “the big eddy”—is only a mile and a half upstream from where my mom posed at the Bowl & Pitcher. Here, the river funnels in through a set of rapids and opens into an expanse a hundred meters wide before the current is split by a cobble bar that becomes an island by mid-summer. As the two streams come together again their flow then confronts a massive cobble bar, one that towers more than 100 feet above the river. It forces the river to make a right turn through another set of rapids. In this space, sometimes into early fall, I get to swim with native redband trout, northern whitefish, the occasional beavers and garter snakes, colorful crawfish, and a mostly merry parade of humans in a variety of small vessels.
Juvenile redband trout swimming among flood deposited cobbles in the Spokane River.
The sheer mass of the Lake Missoula cobbles and boulders is astounding. As you would expect, the pile extends more than fifty miles back toward Lake Pend Oreille, near the site of the glacial ice dam that was the exit for the breakout floods. The depth of the pile is more than 500 feet at the Idaho/Washington state line east of Spokane, but the thickest portion of the pile (apparently deeper than 800 feet) appears to be in the Hillyard Trough, where the massive dump of glacial flood debris redirected the course of the Spokane River to the south, through what is now downtown Spokane and the gorge to the west.
Almost all of the vast cobble pile is now saturated. We know it as the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie aquifer, the City of Spokane’s sole source of drinking water.
There is at least a touch of serendipitous comedy to the discovery of the aquifer in 1894. A city contractor excavating at the site of what would become the city’s Upriver Dam on the Spokane River, essentially hit a gusher of fresh water while digging into the cobbles. That was timely because, even by that time, the city was well on the way to so badly polluting the Spokane River that it would become essential to find an alternative source of unpolluted drinking water. The aquifer provided that, beginning in 1908.
It would take another half century for the city to even begin (1958) to treat the raw sewage it was dumping into the river, and this was more than two decades after the state declared the river a public health hazard in 1931. Fast-forward another half century, to the present, and the City of Spokane—thanks to new generations of civic leadership and ardent environmental activism—is on the verge of completing one of the most effective waste water treatment plants in the world.
Overview of the Big Eddy in west Spokane.
The fluid interplay between the river and the aquifer is extraordinary. As a matter of geography the Spokane River’s headwaters are at Lake Coeur d’Alene directly to the east. But from the state line westward the river goes through stretches where it discharges much of its water into the aquifer, and then, as it approaches the cities of Spokane Valley and Spokane, it goes through stretches where it receives large volumes of cold groundwater from the aquifer.
This matters most in the summer because by the time the river reaches west Spokane, its flow depends almost entirely upon inflow from the aquifer. There are hydrogeological maps that show the areas where aquifer recharges the river. One of the river recharge areas encompasses the big eddy, where I swim and where—because of the dominance of aquifer water in late summer—the river gets even colder as the air temperature in August regularly surpasses 90 degrees.
In the context of a hot summer day, the slap of cold water to the body is a wake up call, and a reminder of the ice age cataclysm that still manages to deliver cold water from Idaho.
At the climax of the Ice Age a massive glacier came face-to-face with the ancient basement rock of North America. Something had to give.
The nature of nature is that the new is generally trying to devour the old. In geology, the engine for this perpetual drama is largely hidden by seawater. In mid-ocean ridges volcanic forces push fresh terrain outward, creating huge plates of fresh rock that behave like slow-moving conveyer belts. When the plates inevitably collide, terrain buckles and melts under pressure, pushing up mountains and volcanoes, and lava.
A corollary to this overview are longstanding, stationary hot spots on the surface crust that convey blowtorch heat from the earth’s mantle. One such hot spot continues to create the Hawaiian islands. Another currently lies beneath the actively steaming caldera at Yellowstone National Park. On a map the Yellowstone hot spot appears to be moving eastward, but this is only because the North American plate is moving to the southwest.
Some 16 million years ago, the hot spot now beneath Yellowstone was situated about where corners of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada intersect today. Geologists think this is the reason more than 50,000 cubic miles of lava (basalt) spewed from hundreds of surface vents in western Idaho, northeast Oregon and southeast Washington. The peak of the vent eruptions was between 14 and 16 million years ago—with continuing smaller eruptions until about 5.5 million years ago.
Snow-covered basalt pillars near Spokane International Airport
The result is the black and brown bedrock that spans the lower Columbia basin and, in some places, is more than 10,000 feet thick. Basalt makes for beautiful palisades and dramatic rimrock cliffs and is otherwise ubiquitous in the lower Columbia Basin and through the Columbia River gorge. Witness, for example, the natural columns in road cuts around Spokane’s international airport. Yet, it would be a far less visible feature of the landscape were it not for Ice Age floods that violently stripped away the overlying topsoil.
On Green Monarch Ridge you can easily see and touch the ancient rock in outcroppings where the Purcell Trench ice lobe repeatedly rammed and sealed itself onto the mountainside, perhaps as recently as 14,000 years ago.
In geologic terms, it’s as though all of this just happened. If you condensed Earth history into a day, the basalt flows would have occurred in the last 5 seconds and the peak Ice Age floods in the last blink of an eye. But it’s eloquent, and perhaps fitting, that at least one character in the Bretzland story is over a billion years old and that you can still see it and touch it.
To do so, you’ll have to drive to Idaho and, lucky you, visit one of the Pacific Northwest’s most beautiful places, east of Sandpoint. Whether you get to Sandpoint via U.S. route 2, or U.S. 95, you’ll be headed toward a junction, north of town, where you’ll want to pick up Idaho state route 200. Route 200 follows the shoreline of Lake Pend Oreille which bends east and then southeastward toward the town of Clark Fork, where the Clark Fork River empties into Lake Pend Oreille.
Along the way, a good place to stop, enjoy the view, have a picnic and gather your bearings is the Trestle Creek beach and campground about ten miles out from Sandpoint.
Lake Pend Oreille with Green Monarch Ridge in the distance.
At the shoreline, the view to the right (west) takes in the Selkirk Mountains and the slopes of the fabled Schweitzer Mountain ski resort. In the other direction, to your left, you can see the northernmost mountains of the Bitterroot Range, including Green Monarch Ridge with its western face plunging steeply into the lake. As unlikely as it may seem, this tranquil scene was ground zero for the epic floods that created Washington’s channeled scablands.
At a lakeside turnout a few more miles down the highway, just before the town of Hope, there is a roadside educational display. One of the large display panels tells the story of the Purcell Trench glacier arriving from the north—as tall as four Space Needles stacked atop one another—and pushing up against Green Monarch Ridge.
The massive glacier was unrelenting, but the Green Monarchs are built from some of the oldest and hardest rock in North America. These are layers of ancient sedimentary and metamorphic rock that accrued in what is known as the Belt Basin, essentially a vast inland sea that formed more than a billion years ago near the westernmost edge of what eventually became the North American craton. Belt Basin rocks are commonly referred to as the Belt Supergroup in the U.S. and the Purcell Supergroup in Canada.
Prichard Formation outcrop along Idaho Route 200 near Hope, ID
Here’s a fun fact. When you’re done perusing the educational signs at the turnout near Hope, just turn around so that you’re looking across the highway. In the road cut beyond the westbound lane you’ll notice layers of exposed rock that are predominately the color of copper but with streaks of tan, white, gray and a dark chocolate shade of brown. It’s not just any rock. It’s an outcrop of the Prichard Formation which is the very basement of the Belt Basin, the oldest rock formation in western North America.
When the Purcell Trench ice sheet met the incredibly hard and old rocks at Green Monarch Ridge the collision created a seal—a natural ice dam 2,000 feet high, trapping the Clark Fork River in its valley. Consequently, a massive body of water, glacial Lake Missoula, built up behind the ice dam. Missoula, Montana, is nearly 200 miles southeast of the Clark Fork ice dam. There is clear evidence that the trapped floodwaters at Missoula were nearly 1,000 feet deep.
The Clark Fork delta, the site of the 2,000 foot high ice dam that created glacial Lake Missoula.
Under such accumulating pressure, the Clark Fork ice dam would periodically disintegrate (with a roar on par with a massive volcanic eruption or asteroid strike) sending an inland tsunami of ice-laden floodwaters racing toward Spokane at highway speeds. Based on the field evidence downstream, geologists think this happened not once, but at least dozens of times.
J Harlen Bretz put forth his theory of catastrophic flooding as the cause for the epic erosional features of Washington’s channeled scablands in 1923. He soon began referring to it as “the Spokane flood.” This is because it was obvious, at least to him, that the Spokane area had been a bottleneck through which most of the floodwaters had passed. According to Bretz’s biographer, John Soennichsen, the geologist was aware of ancient Lake Missoula by 1925. Yet he was reluctant, for several years, to connect the dots.
What what would eventually turn the tide was a finding that another northwest geologist, J.T. Pardee, first shared at a Seattle conference in 1940. There were giant ripple marks on Montana’s Camas Prairie northwest of Missoula. Pardee proposed that the fifty foot-high ripples were the result of sudden, massive draining of Lake Missoula—with the waters clearly heading westward, toward the Columbia Basin. Without explicitly saying so, Pardee was presenting the missing piece that clearly validated Bretz.
The scale of the story can be mind-boggling. It was a cataclysmic event that spanned time zones, a great wave of devastation the followed the curve of the planet from the alpine beauty of the northern Rockies to the bare hills and sage of the Pasco Basin, and the Columbia Gorge beyond.
Had Bretz’s great flood theory of the scablands been less controversial, Pardee’s finding (formalized in a 1942 paper) would have abruptly ended the debate. Yet—as Soennichsen recounts in his fine book Bretz’s Flood—the controversy dragged on for decades. It was a hollow debate which had far less to do with the geologic evidence than with the stature and hubris of the prominent geologists who’d dismissed Bretz’s theory from the start.
With science alone, it is difficult to capture the scale of the story, although I think you’d agree that the road turnout signs on Highway 200 near Hope do a pretty job, especially given the space limitations. The scale can be mind-boggling when one ties to comprehend a cataclysmic earth story that spans time zones, following the curve of the planet from the alpine beauty of the northern Rockies to the bare hills and sage of the Pasco Basin, and the Columbia Gorge beyond.
The timescale is also mind-bending. Bretz was nearly 100 years old when he passed and well into his late nineties when he was given his profession’s top award, finally recognizing his persistence and the quality of his work. It was a vindication that took far too long given the relative brevity of a human life.
On Green Monarch Ridge you can easily see and touch the ancient rock in outcroppings where the Purcell ice lobe rammed and sealed itself onto the mountainside, perhaps as recently as 14,000 years ago, maybe less.
Outcrop of ancient Belt Basin rocks on Green Monarch Ridge.
Some of the intransigent rocks that greeted the ice front are 1.3 billion years old. Despite the current, human-induced warming trend, it’s likely there will be other Ice Ages, and more ice-damming collisions between the face of the Purcell Trench glacier and the Belt Basin rocks on Green Monarch Ridge. It’s the kind of long story that can repeat itself.
A poem of geography, and the signature of a catastrophe
If it had been a game of cards, and not merely science, J Harlen Bretz had gathered a straight flush. Nearly a century ago, after two summers in the field, he was ready to lay out his provocative case that a great ice age flood had rampaged across eastern and central Washington.
Some pieces of his argument were so compelling they scarcely needed help from the other pieces.
There were, for example, large calves of rock that just happened to show up, unannounced and unexplained, in places far from their mother outcroppings.
Five foot high ice-rafted erratic in the scabland pines west of Spokane
Bretz had not been the first geologist to notice them. But part of what set him apart was the intensity of his curiosity. He was determined to find an explanation. He referred to the wayward rocks as “erratic bowlders.”
Erratics, by definition, are large rocks transported long distances by ice. What caught Bretz’s attention, as early as 1914, were the dozens of granitic and metamorphic “bowlders” found resting atop basalt bedrock as far south as the Columbia River gorge and as far away as the Willamette Valley. That was strange. Ice was the only plausible means of transport, but dozens of large erratics—many the size of refrigerators or larger appliances—were dropped far beyond the furthest, documented advance of the Cordilleran glaciers.
Finally, in 1923, Bretz played his hand. Consistent with his other field evidence, he proposed that the scabland erratics southwest of Spokane had been ensconced in glacial ice that had shattered and become flotsam in an enormous ice age flood. Although hang-gliding and zooming around on a jet ski are palpably exciting, it can also be fun to just close your eyes and imagine icebergs on the crests of towering waves that overwhelm Spokane and spill out into the Columbia Basin at highway speeds. And then, as the water recedes, the icebergs ground themselves on hillsides, melting and releasing their cargos of rocks and at least one large meteorite (the Willamette Meteorite, discovered in 1902) to boot.
Bretz hill near Revere, WA.
Bretz’s explanation of the ice-rafted erratics was easily the most vivid among his quiver of arguments for the great flood. The others were more technical—i.e. the “braided” nature of scabland channels, the absence of glacial till, and the power of the floods to quickly remove astounding volumes of soil and underlying basalt. But one feature, in particular, was both poetic in the way Bretz described it and hauntingly graceful in the way it actually appears on the landscape.
Bretz hill south of Benge, WA
I think of them as the Bretz hills.
As a rule, all Bretz hills were once Palouse hills. Palouse hills are known and rhapsodized for their mesmerizing, dune-like crests that are the signature landform of Whitman County, for decades the nation’s leading county in wheat production. The hills consist primarily of windblown loess—silt created by ice age glaciers grinding across the landscape, seasoned with volcanic ash. Loess is incredibly efficient at holding soil moisture, which helps explain the prolific crop yields in the Palouse.
Whitman County doesn’t have a monopoly on Palouse hills. Rolling hills of fine-grained loessial and volcanic soils extend into northern Idaho but also to the north, west, and south, including parts of Spokane, Lincoln, Adams, Franklin, Walla Walla, Grant and Douglas counties.
What makes a Bretz hill different from an ordinarily beautiful Palouse hill is that a Bretz hill is a survivor. It has withstood the onslaught of ice age floodwaters and been distinctively re-shaped. There are several places where you can see what happened, but my favorite is state route 23 between the towns of Sprague and St. John.
Generally speaking, the “prows” of Bretz Hills point toward Spokane—the direction from which the water came—and the tails toward Pasco, which is where the water would eventually pool before heading out toward the Pacific Ocean via Wallula Gap and the Columbia gorge.
Starting at Sprague and heading east, what you see is classic scabland—the surface scrubbed to the bedrock, with just enough grass growing among the sagebrush to feed grazing livestock. Basalt buttes are in all directions, and so are a remarkable number of lakes and wetlands. It is cowboy movie scenery.
After seven miles, the landscape changes. On your right is the Whitman County town of Lamont. If you were to take the turn-off toward Lamont what you would see on your right would be the gnarly scabland terrain you’ve just traversed.
Scabland meets the Palouse north of Lamont, WA
On your left, however, would be bucolic Palouse. But if you look closely at the boundary hills—those bordering the scabland to the west—they are not classic Palouse hills. Because they’ve been overwhelmed by torrents of glacial floodwater, their shapes have been changed. Their slopes are steeper and they are stretched in length so that they look, from above, like elongated tear drops.
Of course, Bretz was offering the photographs of the flood-altered hills as evidence, not asart. After all, he clearly knew he was launching himself into a process that would involve years of arguments. It would take decades to win the arguments. But that wasn’t his fault. He was right to begin with.
This is a good place to hand the writing over to Bretz, from his 1923 paper:
“Literally hundreds of isolated groups of maturely eroded hills of loess stand in the scablands. Their gentle interior slopes are identical with those far from the scabland tracts. But their marginal slopes, descending to the scablands, commonly are very steep…” “A very striking and significant feature of the steepened slopes is their convergence at the northern ends of the groups to form great prows pointing up the scablands’ gradient…It is impossible to study these prow-pointed loessial hills, surrounded by the scarred and channeled basalt, without seeing in them the result of a powerful eroding agent which attacked them about their bases…”
Generally speaking, the “prows” point toward Spokane—the direction from which the water came—and the tails toward Pasco, which is where the water would eventually pool before heading out toward the Pacific Ocean via Wallula Gap and the Columbia gorge.
Group of Bretz hills in the scabland south of Ewan, WA
If you were to go even further south, through Lamont, you would soon lose the pavement and pass on to a gravel road that continues to follow the edge of the scablands. What you would eventually see on the distant horizon are a fleet of Bretz Hills, their prows aligned parallel to one other, as if sailing toward Spokane. They are but one example of the “isolated groups” of loessial hills that Bretz described—Palouse hills that somehow survived the great floods.
If you’d stayed on Highway 23—instead of turning off to Lamont—you would likely sense that you’d entered the heart of the Palouse. The highway quickly becomes a twisting ribbon through grain covered hills, their slopes sprawling in all directions. But seven miles later, the scene repeats itself as the hills abruptly end as you near Rock Creek and enter the eastern-most braid of the scablands—this one a bit more than four miles wide. If you were to look south, you would see Bretz hills in the distance, with their ghostly prows pointed north. Then the highway really does enter the heart of the Palouse and makes its way toward the Whitman County seat at Colfax.
There is an aesthetic quality to the scablands’ tear drop hills. Yet the story behind their survival and re-shaping creates a parable and quiet instruction on how to photograph them, or at least how to try.
As Bretz noted, the tear drop hills exist throughout the scablands, though they are more common in the easternmost tracts. The landscape along the lower Palouse River as it approaches Palouse Falls is another area where the tear drop hills are hard to miss.
In his 1923 paper, Bretz offered photographs of two isolated examples—one near Rock Lake and the other near Palouse Falls, south of Hooper. They’re small black & white photos that merely capture his point about the shape of the hills, both in slope and alignment. Of course, Bretz was offering the photographs as evidence, not as art. After all, he clearly knew he was launching himself into a process that would involve years of arguments. It would take decades to win the arguments. But that wasn’t his fault. He was right to begin with.
Whether it’s “The Sisters” at Wallula Gap, the massive cataract at Dry Falls, or the Stonehenge-like aura created by “The Feathers” at Frenchman Springs Coulee, there are several “oh my god” destinations in Bretzland that don’t need a story, let alone a caption.
Snow-covered Bretz Hill west of Fishtrap Lake.
In their graceful lines and isolation, the Bretz hills don’t need a story either. There is an aesthetic quality to the tear drop hills. Yet the story behind their survival and re-shaping creates a parable and quiet instruction on how to photograph them, or at least how to try. And, thanks to Bretz, I don’t feel as though I need to insert a compass for direction, or a pickup truck for scale. He’s done the hard work. I just need to get the camera to work.
–tjc
Stories, dreams, and landscapes from the Inland Northwest
