EXPERIENCING THE ICE AGE FLOODS, PART IV

After circling Grand Coolee Dam and retracing our route partway back down the upper portion of Grand Coulee itself, we cut across country to the west to intercept Moses Coulee where Highway 2 crosses it in Douglas County. Then by flying southwest, the way much of the flood waters traveled, we viewed many features of cataclysmic alteration of the surface features. These included dramatic vertical walls, more hanging valleys, and considerable amounts of materials which were carried from the scablands, sifted and graded enroute, and deposited here in bottomlands that allowed slowing of the passing floods.
Once the floods exited the coulee and joined the basic route of the Columbia River, additional silts and sands and fine sediments fell out of suspension and left gigantic sand bars in the river floor. West Bar (above) is one of several extensive deposits in the lower river channel. Most running water leaves standing ripples on the sandy bottoms and the scale of these common, typical ridges and valleys are a measure of the strength and amount of the flow that formed them. In the case of the bar pictured (only a few miles downstream from Wenatchee, WA) the giant ripples lay patiently in place for years before they were recognized for what they are - evidence of an incredibly humongous flow of water which was needed to form them. In fact they are so massive in scale, and although many people searching for evidence to prove or disprove various theories about the Ice Age Floods actually walked over them on multiple occasions, it was not until the age of flight allowed the ripples to be seen from the air that they were recognized at all.
A few more miles down river from the giant ripples, are several spectacular features. These are huge retrograde, dry waterfall coulees which were formed when flood waters that had cut the channeled scablands and filled the Quincy Basin region to the northeast overflowed into the Columbia just north of where Interstate 90 now crosses the river. As the water dropped over the steep walls in volumes unbelievably wide and deep, the columnar basalt and other volcanic deposits steadily gave way causing the abrubt edge of the cateract to march upstream as the walls beneath the floods collapsed. In this way Potholes Coulee and Frenchman Coulee were created. In the former (pictured above) large bowls were also caused by the weight, violence, and drop of its abrasive load, thus the "Potholes" name. In the latter (pictured below), the name was taken from the Frenchman Hills which directed the torrent to this location where a deep and rather long channel was carved back from the river it sought to reach.

Next time David and I fly over some of these fascinating geological anomalies, we will be able to take better pictures (with the windows open to eliminate the foggy results of shooting through crazed plastic) and possibly better angles to take advantage of lighting and of contrast caused by shadow. This may become a years-long effort because the total terrain spans several states and the effects left behind are so varied. Some of them are also becoming obscured by the intervening centuries. There is no way possible to see it all in a single flight, unless perhaps from the space shuttle, in which case close-ups are hard to do. I'm up to the project as long as David's interest holds. That's a lot of territory to cover, and much of it deserves a "boots-on view". Really, I think that at some point in coming summers, some of you folk who are also intrigued by this grand mystery should join us on a camping tour of the entire floodlands from Montana to the Pacific Ocean. Is anyone interested in that idea?

Meanwhile, thanks again, Son, for a fascinating and thrilling Father's Day gift. I always enjoy flying with you, but to feature the "Floods" and to include an expert guide and narrator was just genius! (Y'all readers see previous blogs to learn about about Bruce Bjornstad.) I know you are skilled at matching a perfect gift to each recipient, but this was simply overwhelming! I am enjoying bragging about it (and you) far and wide. Well Done Indeed!

WHAT A "WHOOT"

I'll post the final "Ice Age Floods Flight" in a few days, folks, but meanwhile enjoy my surprise visitor just outside our dining room window. Can you guess what this bird is? Well, OK, it sure looks like an owl, doesn't it? But what kind of owl? And just how big is it?

At times the daily crowd of birds doing "touch and go"s at my feeders can number in the several dozens. So it was on this occasion. I was studying at the table, when I became aware of a huge, dark cloud thrashing past the window. This was no chicadee, nuthatch, or finch. This was a comparative giant. I don't know whether the owl actually made a feeding pass at the smaller birds, but after sort of floundering a tad it finally settled on a low branch in the Austrian pine about fifteen feet away and at eye level to me.

"My camera!! Quickly!!" I hollered to Betty, and I was fortunate to get a few hurried photos while becoming aware of a bully batch of crows that were trying to spook my guest into further flight. We rarely have raucous crows make such a fuss here, so I guess the owl was their patsy before it arrived. These black bandits never let up on the owl and considered it an interloper worth their fuss and bother.

The owl's dark eyes were a first clue. Most owls have yellow eyes. The patterning of wing and tail easily eliminated the barn owl in a moment, thus we quickly narrowed the choice to either one or the other of two remarkable and somewhat notorious Northwest owls. It was the first step in making an identification.

There's another detail that helps the birdwatchers. As you can see, this owl is sitting with his back to the camera. That is a most unfortunate fact for the sake of the pictures because the two remaining choices are definitively and diagnostically differentiated by - you guessed it - the pattern of the breast and belly feathers! Otherwise, the wing and back are remarkably alike, with the horizontal striping clearly shown in the picture above being typical in both possibilities.

Enough teasing and testing: Strix Occidentalis, the Spotted Owl and Strix varia, the Barred Owl , the only reasonable choices, are very alike, with the field guides giving few differences other than agreeing that the Barred Owl may be a trifle larger on average. We guessed our guest to be 15" to 16" tall, and I know this specimen displayed a wingspan well over three feet, tip to tip, upon landing. Hmmmm. So it could be either bird! We watched closely for several minutes, hoping it would turn toward us. All that turned, however, was its head. First all the way around to the left until it stared me steadily right in the eye, and then in no hurry, it turned its head 360 degrees to the right until it again stared directly at me as before!! Only then did it swivel the remarkable neck straight up to spot the crows which were landing, squawking, in the top of the tree above it.

Had the belly and breast shown in this picture, no one would have doubted that the owl perched here was a Barred Owl. A shot of this bird's chest would have shown it as being spotted and the belly from "breastbone to vent" would have displayed the distinctive vertical stripes Peterson calls "streaks"! A spotted owl, on the other hand, would have had a spotted chest and a spotted belly with the pattern lower gradually becoming horizontal pale bands which Peterson describes as "bars", thus causing some confusion (bars on a spotted owl?. Well, just remember the real Barred Owl has up & down stripes on its tummy.)

How do I know which owl this was? As it passed the window already flared for landing with its chest and belly lifted up and out and the feet swinging forward to seize the limb, there was the proof! Vertical stripes!! I confess I hurried to the books several minutes later after the owl flew away across the neighbor's field (still harrassed by the crows) and into one of the ponderosa pines out of view. I hurried to confirm my guess so I could add the right choice to my bird list..

Strix Varia, species number sixty on my "yard list" is the Barred Owl. WOW!! It joins the Barn Owl and the Great Horned Owl to become my third owl on the list. Cool, huh?

EXPERIENCING THE ICE AGE FLOODS,PART III

After about an hour of flying north, we passed Ephrata and nearby Soap Lake and entered the southern end of Grand Coulee. It is fascinating to see this deep watercut which resulted not from ages of river-type erosion but from gigantic flash floods tearing across surface of the land, trying to bypass the southern edge of the glacial icecap and follow the ever so slight drop in elevation. A river would have left a wide wandering route, but in this region the tremendous volume and pressures of raging flood waters gouged deep trenches, called coulees, which feature,among other characteristics, remarkably vertical walls and distinctive scouring of the bottom surfaces. In the picture below, taken just above Dry Falls, the scree at the bottom has been formed and accumulated by more recent erosion of the loose lava walls and is much younger than the floods.

The Dry Falls segment separates Upper and Lower Grand Coulee. In the photo below, the falls portion is in the top center of the picture. For a close and sharp picture check out David's recent post at http://www.pirep.blogspot.com/ and take a moment to read his text. At this point in its southwestward rush, water hurled itself off the these cliffs to the bottom over 350 feet below. The total width of this massive cataract measured along the ragged edge may have been as much as five or six miles along a irregular and sinuous route. The sound of so much water hundreds of feet deep falling so far must have made a thunderous and continuous roar that would have been heard for scores of miles. A few days after each flood passed - silence again, for the falls were dry again! Notice in the picture and closer to the foreground, evidence of brading channels, and on both sides a few lakes which remain today.
After whatever accumulated topsoils had been flushed away in the earlier floods, what remained was layer upon layer of ancient lava flows which covered large portions of these eastern Washington basins. Much of this igneous material was deposited like the various layers of a cake and was composed mostly of basalt. In many places, the hot basalt, after being put in place, solidified into separate, loose, interlocking columns or rods of rock. (Think of pillars of landscaping rock popular in many shopping complexes.) As the deep coulees formed under the rushing flood, massive and unbelievably powerful underwater "tornados" sucked great holes in the layers of basalt and lava. The result was many places where deep cavities were formed - gigantic potholes - which are additional evidence of the scale of the floods which formed them. Other huge potholes formed at the base of many of the falls along the route.
The final picture shows a "hanging valley", a common sight all along the coulee walls. These were formed when the newly torn coulees slashed across the path of existing watersheds completely separating the source from the destination in countless small streams and rivers. In these cases, the flowing water had no option by to hurl itself into the abyss and begin eroding the vertical coulee walls. Here we see how a small waterflow which had been gently dropping across the landscape was interrupted by the abrupt flood-formed gash and was radically altered from that point the the coulee floor.
All along our flight route one phenomenon after another testified to the cataclysms and changes the Ice Age Floods caused in thoussssssssands of square miles of varying terrain across parts of four states! [Note: I thought I would just leave that last typo; it seems so appropriate here!] We averaged perhaps a little over 100 MPH overall as we flew over all these sights and did not linger long in any one location. Consequently we were able to see dozens of features which spoke of the size and power of rushing water which rearranged the surface, marking it and molding it and moving it in curious and stunning ways. In fact, in viewing so much so quickly, some of the sights were so amazing and challenging to grasp that I simply forgot to take pictures as a witness to what chaos can accomplish.

In the final blog on this topic, I'll show a few flood caused features we saw on the return leg which basically followed the present day Columbia River back to the Tri-cities area. Come on back in a few days.

EXPERIENCING THE ICE AGE FLOODS, PART II

Please understand that the emormity of the Ice Age Floods is difficult to describe as it take a diligent effort even to begin to grasp the sequence and scope and devastation of a series of flash floods which swept some 700(?) miles from Western Montana to the Pacific Ocean in only a few days while severely thrashing the earth's surface where it passed. Walls of water hundreds of feet deep and miles wide traveling at speeds sometimes approaching 100 miles per hour are not easy to imagine, but their existance is clearly and dramatically left upon the surface which remains. These floods were periodic and reoccured each time the glacial lakes reformed and filled until they caused their ice dams to fail, at which moment another giant flood was on its way across the land.

The first photo shows son David, our pilot, and Bruce Bjornstad, our guide and "guest lecturer" whom David invited along to point out the features we would be seeing on a three hour flight to the north of Richland, Washington. The area we were able to cover represents a very small portion of the entire flood plain altogether. I would guess our entire flight path may have been a little over 300 miles, a mere token of the total square mileage the floods affected. Still in this and a couple of more blogs, I will try to share some photographs and descriptions of these stunning geological evidences of watery chaos long ago. One more disclaimer; although being airborn and having an expert detail the features helped us see the evidence, taking candid shots with a small digital "point-and-shoot" through the plastic of an airplane window does not hope to include all that is on display nor does it begin to help pull all the features into a meaningful relationship. To do that, read the recommended books, view the videos sometimes shown on PBS ststions, and either drive or fly the flood regions yourself with your own guides or guidebooks. You can not help but be awed. (This explanation also applies to future blogs on this subject.)

Remember the water basically travelled west out of Montana and across Idaho, southwest across eastern Washington (roughly from Spokane to the Tri-Cities), and after a two or three episodes of ponding into temporary lakes, it finally squeezed into the Columbia River George and headed westward toward Portland and the sea beyond. Unfortunately, the first half of our sightseeing route took us north, quartering across the general flood-flow in an upstream direction. Even on the vast and mostly level-looking landscape, various local features which rose even a few hundred feet above the plain had considerable influence on where the bulk of the flood waters could travel easily. Just north and east of the Hanford Reach portion of the present Columbia River path, the floods encountered a couple of east-to-west highlands; first, Frenchman Hills between Vantage and Moses Lake and secondly, the Saddle Mountains west of Othello. From the air neither seem very dramatic, but they were tall enough to cause the deluge to divide around them speeding the flow at each end and causing remarkable local changes in the surface of the land. The previous photo is of the Drumheller Channels (named by Bretz after the owners of a local ranch) where the waters not only scoured the soils away leaving deep, braided and interlaced ravines but carved out deep, often elongated lakes which persist even today. In the following shot the random channeling can be seen interspaced with occasional taller buttes remaining that were strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the passing flood.

The last picture in this series shows the Frenchman Hills from the east end looking to the west. From our elevation it was hard to see how this little range, only a few hundred feet high, could be tall enough to reroute the flood waters, but it did. Study the slope of the fields to left and right to discern the run of the ridgeline. At both ends of the Hills, remarkable features were formed as the waters piled upon themselves getting around this obstacle. Besides the scarring of the Drumheller Channels on the east, the Frenchman Coulee formed to the west where the water poured at last over the final parapet into the Columbia River valley. I'll show a photograph of that in another blog later.

I'll admit to one problem I had while enjoying this flight. I was often so intrigued by what I was seeing all around us and hearing narrated from Bruce that I just simply forgot to take pictures of some of the features we were flying over. I'm hoping to join David again on future explorations.

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