In Washington state there are very few windows into the deepest reaches of geologic time. But one of them is at the so-called Willow Lake Aureole near Four Lakes, west of Spokane. About 50 million years ago a balloon of magma, from deep in the crust, cooked and lifted a 1.45 billion year old layer of the ancient Belt Basin to the surface, where the relatively recent Ice Age floods helped to expose the PreCambrian rock. It’s a dynamic piece of natural art, with the magma (now granite) swirling amongst greenish chunks of the ancient Belt rock (the Wallace Formation) as though the Wallace rocks are green raisins in a pudding of granite and sparkling black amphibolite.