After spending the night at the confluence of the Snake and Palouse rivers, we enjoyed an early breakfast featuring scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. This morning, we visited Palouse Falls and took Zodiac trips up the amazing Palouse River.
This landscape tells a story. Eighteen million years ago, giant basaltic lava flows began oozing from a hot spot of molten rock nearly 300-miles wide, centered in present day southern Oregon. Between seventeen to six million years ago, cracks opened at weak spots in the earth’s crust in eastern Washington, spewing molten lava over 70,000 square miles. This occurred more than 300 times, each layer up to hundreds of feet thick.
More recently, beginning 18,000 years ago, gigantic and cataclysmic Ice Age floods carved the land into channeled scablands, the deeply scarred features we see today. The torrential floods carved the Palouse River Canyon rapidly. We investigated these forces by driving Zodiacs up the Palouse River, seeing fall colors, and visiting Palouse Falls. In the afternoon we transited the lock at Little Goose and at twilight, Lower Granite Dam.
