Overcast skies at daybreak gave way to hazy sunshine providing for excellent viewing of scour channels and waterfalls of the Palouse River. Here, the river is hidden behind columns of Columbia River basalt where it flows along a deeply scoured joint, before it makes a sharp right turn and bursts into view, falling 180 feet into a large plunge pool. However impressive the falls are today, they are but a trickle compared to the cataclysmic Missoula floods that scoured an eight-mile-wide channel before plunging into the Snake River canyon and eroding a 400 foot deep, five mile long gorge back to the present-day waterfalls. Scoured basalt and huge gravel bars along the Snake River attest to the dramatic geologic changes wrought by these huge ice-age floods about 12,700 years ago.
Lewis and Clark never explored far enough up the Palouse River to enjoy the view as we did today.
