The Snake & Palouse Rivers
We awoke this morning on the Snake River and continued upstream until lunchtime. We marveled at the tall, arid basalt cliffs that confined the river to its channel. Our naturalist, Bette Lu Krause, provided an overview of the biology of salmon, which formed the basis of the life of the Indians who have inhabited the area for over 10,000 years and who assisted Lewis and Clark as they moved westward in 1805 and eastward in 1806. Then Bob Gatten, the expedition historian, presented talks on the personnel of the Corps of Discovery and on his search for the birthplace of Captain William Clark.
We spent the afternoon on the Palouse River, named originally by the Expedition for George Drouillard. The more adventurous of us headed out in kayaks to see the cliffs, vegetation, and wildlife from water level and in comparative solitude. Others of us had two highly varied experiences of the river: Zodiac cruises up the Palouse, with a narrative on the geology, botany, and zoology of the area by our naturalists, and a bus voyage from river level to the tops of the cliffs overlooking the river. During the latter journey, we viewed the 198-feet-tall Palouse Falls and its plunge pool.
All of us gained a better understanding of the formation of the thick layers of basalt that covered 80,000 square miles of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and also the erosion of the basalt caused by the catastrophic ice-age floods that raced through the area perhaps as many as 40 times between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago.
