Welcome to Palouse Falls State Park.
So, it's mid-January,
We're just south of Washtucna and this is the Palouse River Falls.
The falls is about 180 feet from there to there which,
it's kind of crazy to think about.
Naturally somebody went over that in a kayak, which that's pretty impressive,
There's a video of it and you can just find that on YouTube.
But uh, yeah, it's an interesting part and we're gonna kind of delve into the geology of this place some.
There's some trails around here. We'll walk those.
A bunch of people have died here. Of course. So, four people have died since 2016 and
like 17 or 18 have gotten airlifted out because people walk up to the edge and well, they, they fall.
They fall right in and who knows how many dogs have gone in the trink here?
Enough to probably be really sad.
So everything that you see here is a relatively new geological feature.
If you go back to my
geological tour video where we went to Steptoe Butte and we look at the hills of the Palouse, all of eastern
Washington looked like that.
Those nice rolling hills of loess which is like dirt that's kinda like flour.
Very loose stuff and you can actually see
up there some of those hills and you saw some of the hills when we were coming in.
So about ten thousand years ago, none of this was here and the
[dog howling]
Laika. That's Laika.
The Palouse River actually paralleled the Snake, and
as the Missoula floods came down
they were coming down through Cheney and south and crashing into the basaltic ridge
that's about five miles south.
And that water, extreme amount of water, hundreds of feet of water
blasting through this region
eroded the basaltic ridge and
created a giant, giant waterfall. So the Palouse here, the Palouse River did not actually create any of
what you see here. So, this whole Coulee was made by the Ice Age floods and,
you know, a river
that's going through a valley where you get that that V in it, that's created either through the river cutting it or
the river holding its own in the land rising up around it.
And then if you get one that's like a lobe shape that's from a, uh
glacier carving it out. Coulee is
from a
waterfall cutting back.
So, as that Ice Age waterfall went over that ridge and into the Snake
it started to fracture this basalt.
You can see how fractured this stuff is. And break it off and send it away. You can see across the way here
all of the fractures in that. So, even though the Palouse is here now
it wasn't the one that created this. The old
channel that the Palouse went into is called the Washtucna Coulee and
that actually dumps out into the Columbia, kinda where
the Fir Road area is now. Like if you go back and watch the agate hunting videos out there.
I believe a lot of that material that you see out in like West Richland, out in the Tri-Cities and stuff
was deposited by the Palouse
before the last ice age when it was running out there and depositing its material. Not 100% sure
but it's definitely something I'd like to investigate in the future.
So one thing that you can see here is all these different layers
You can see: layer, layer, layer.
So, all of those basaltic flows are different,
well, they are different flows. The bottom kind of big three that you see there it...
[dog barks]
Laika. The big three that you see there at the bottom are the Grande Ronde basalts.
And then that much thicker one is the Wanapum. And I actually have this kind of cool
cross-section picture here, and you can kind of see what I see.
Which is pretty neat.
You can, uh,
well, you can read that. Actually, you know what?
I'm gonna put that in and you can just look at it yourself, and we'll maybe do some type of overlay.
But this is a really interesting canyon.
I mean the the fact that it's receded five miles from the Snake. And we're gonna head down there next.
But the fact that those were able to erode so much of this highly fractured basalt is really cool.
This is also the perfect time of year to come out here. You know, it's,
no one's here. We have this whole place to ourselves.
State park back there where you can camp do those state park things
But it's pretty neat. There's also that big ice disk down there. That's slowly rotating and acquiring more ice.
Sara: Take a bow!
That's pretty good.
It's really hard to imagine this landscape
during the Ice Age floods as the Missoula
Ice dam broke. 'Cause you know the waterfall's
185 feet or so, and then you would have two or three hundred feet of water.
Muddy water with giant chunks of ice and rocks
coming over this. This is an absolute
raging landscape
carving off this basalt.
So, the Palouse Falls is over there. So we're up above it now. There's that little fall.
You can still really see, even up here, some of the basalt flow layers.
That'd be a tough way to go, falling down the, falling down the cliff.
But here, you know, we're looking down the Coulee.
You can really kind of imagine a waterfall working its way up here, slowly eroding at the edge.
Currently Palouse Falls has this um
kind of undercut
pocket that goes back into the cliff. And then I think stuff is fracturing off and falling
into the, into the river.
Not actively like today, but
over the past 10,000 years, that's kind of what has been happening.
Maybe it's uh, maybe it's time for a drone eventually.
When the DJ, DJI Mavic Minis, something like that, be able to fly around.
Check out some of the stuff like this, up close.
There's a road over there that works its way down to that other side, but it's just like a
dirt double track. So not snowy winter conditions, but very pretty out here.
Sara: Feels moist up here.
Yeah, well you can feel the spray coming out of the the pool at the bottom.
You can see right there somebody's a foot away from the edge, not even knowing if that's in that edge or snow.
Foolishness.
Scablands sure are cool.
So right now, we're down in Lions Ferry. We are five miles downstream of the Palouse Falls,
you're looking upstream at that.
This is the Columbia River right there. That's the bridge to 91 and
kind of wanted to come down here to point out how much erosive power there is behind the ice age floods.
All of that
continued all the way over and this was just a giant waterfall. And all of that basalt
got washed out during it.
It's a hard to even imagine,
that right there which is probably at least
300 feet and then another
300 feet of water on top of that, rushing over that edge and into the Columbia.
What do you think?
Sara: Yeah.
Hard to imagine?
Well, I hope you enjoyed watching that.
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