Palouse River Canyon
Green, green for the briefest time is the sweep of scarred Columbia River Basin plateau where we traveled today in yellow school buses that met us at a Zodiac landing spot.
From the sheer bluff at Palouse Falls State Park we overlooked the gorge torn into layered black volcanic basalt flows by ice age torrents.
These Ice Age Floods repeated time after time between 17,000 and 14,000 years ago and spread across 16,000 square miles to dramatically mark the landscape across much of eastern Washington and leave their track marks all the way to the Pacific Ocean as they sped down the Columbia in a rushing wall 900 feet high. It was a cataclysm time after time, and only yesterday in geologic history.
May is the perfect time to visit for the falls are at full bloom and the bunchgrasses and flowers at their peak in this otherwise arid landscape. The piercing cackle of Peregrine falcons drew our attention to a pair that established their aerie in the punchbowl walls just downstream from the 185-foot falls. Faster than the falcons, though, were the white-throated swifts sheering through the air above and below us.
Pink phlox, purple lupine, butter yellow of balsam root, blue of flax and the white of the medicinal yarrow and the deadly death camas spotted the green of the rangeland with swatches of color.
Below us were the shelter caves of the Palouse Indian people who had continuous occupation for almost 10,000 years or since the Ice Age. These people are sometimes stereotyped as big game hunters but they lived in small groups and from these shelters worked the river for fish and mussels and caught small game like rabbits, marmots and squirrels by trapping them. The women gathered a variety of seeds, roots and berries through spring and summer. Their hunters used razor sharp obsidian points thrown with light spears called atlatls, devices that extended a spear-thrower’s arm, enabling him to hurl projectiles twice as far and with greater force.
When horses arrived here in the 1720’s these Palouse people with their neighbors, the Nez Perce practiced selective breeding and developed the finest horses in The West, the Appaloosa. The name originated when US Army officers purchased or bartered for these horses and proudly referred to them as “a Palouse.”
Green, green for the briefest time is the sweep of scarred Columbia River Basin plateau where we traveled today in yellow school buses that met us at a Zodiac landing spot.
From the sheer bluff at Palouse Falls State Park we overlooked the gorge torn into layered black volcanic basalt flows by ice age torrents.
These Ice Age Floods repeated time after time between 17,000 and 14,000 years ago and spread across 16,000 square miles to dramatically mark the landscape across much of eastern Washington and leave their track marks all the way to the Pacific Ocean as they sped down the Columbia in a rushing wall 900 feet high. It was a cataclysm time after time, and only yesterday in geologic history.
May is the perfect time to visit for the falls are at full bloom and the bunchgrasses and flowers at their peak in this otherwise arid landscape. The piercing cackle of Peregrine falcons drew our attention to a pair that established their aerie in the punchbowl walls just downstream from the 185-foot falls. Faster than the falcons, though, were the white-throated swifts sheering through the air above and below us.
Pink phlox, purple lupine, butter yellow of balsam root, blue of flax and the white of the medicinal yarrow and the deadly death camas spotted the green of the rangeland with swatches of color.
Below us were the shelter caves of the Palouse Indian people who had continuous occupation for almost 10,000 years or since the Ice Age. These people are sometimes stereotyped as big game hunters but they lived in small groups and from these shelters worked the river for fish and mussels and caught small game like rabbits, marmots and squirrels by trapping them. The women gathered a variety of seeds, roots and berries through spring and summer. Their hunters used razor sharp obsidian points thrown with light spears called atlatls, devices that extended a spear-thrower’s arm, enabling him to hurl projectiles twice as far and with greater force.
When horses arrived here in the 1720’s these Palouse people with their neighbors, the Nez Perce practiced selective breeding and developed the finest horses in The West, the Appaloosa. The name originated when US Army officers purchased or bartered for these horses and proudly referred to them as “a Palouse.”
