Spring snowmelt from the Bitteroot Mountains poured over Palouse Falls where we arrived via school bus.
The green Palouse River squeezes through its black basalt hallway and spills 200 feet into a natural punchbowl.
Some 10,000 years ago walls of glacial melt water 700 feet high charged repeatedly over the treeless land of coulees and mesas that surround Palouse Falls State Park.
These Bretz Floods, named for a novice geologist, J. Harlan Bretz who first deciphered the clues on the landscape, originated with a lobe of the Continental Glacier that damned a Columbia River tributary.When the glacier retreated Palouse River altered course and followed this flood channel and plunge.
A veil of mist swirls within the punchbowl, acts as a rainbow prism in the morning sun and refreshes a band of Maiden Hair Fern that clings to the punchbowl wall.
There was another swirl. Violet Green Swallows and White-throated Swifts careened around the falls overlook, another 400 feet above the falls.
The new discovery on this spring’s Palouse Falls visit is a pair of Peregrine Falcons that have established an aerie in the cliffs.
Downstream at river level another contingent of Sea Lionguests worked up Palouse River in Zodiacs and kayaks from where the ship anchored at the confluence with Snake River.
Naturalist and Zodiac driver Steve Engle from Portland, OR, was showing his group a colony of Cliff Swallows. While they were focused on the swallow swarm one of the Peregrines dashed in and plucked a swallow from mid-air. Bird watching can’t get better than this.
In our Lindblad Expeditions there are support people who make possible our side excursions, like our yellow school bus drivers who keep a tryst here every spring and fall with Sea Lion.A very special driver is Cecilia England of Hermiston, OR, who, at our request, brought her king-sized bed quilt. It displays all 50 official state birds. Cecilia, with Mid-Columbia School Bus Company, rose at 4:30 a.m. to get her bus and drive more than 100 miles through the vast wheat and range land to meet us in this remote corner of southeast Washington.
It took four of us to hold up and spread the quilt for all to admire. This white-haired grandmother who takes us to Palouse Falls hand-painted every bird on all 50 panels before stitching them onto her quilt. The Western Meadowlark, the cheeriest songster in all these wide open spaces, has five panels in Cecilia’s quilt. They represent Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas and North Dakota.
