The Palouse River
We awoke to yet another beautiful sunrise east of the Cascades. We had left Clarkston behind overnight, and traveled through a couple of the Snake River dams, and down 75 miles until reaching the mouth of a tiny river named the Palouse, after an Indian tribe that once inhabited the area.
Since the erection of Lower Monumental Dam just downstream, the backwaters filled the Palouse, which was once little more than a stream. This has given us an opportunity that Lewis and Clark did not have as they passed the mouth of this little river in 1805: to travel upstream and witness some of the spectacular geological formations of the area. We still find ourselves in the rainshadow of the Cascades, so these areas receive little more than 10 inches of rain a year. The desert landscapes are softly coloured and beautiful, especially on clear days like today, and an additional benefit of little vegetation is the fact that the rocks become so much more apparent—and what rocks we have around here! Until about 13 000 years ago, cataclysmic Ice Age floods scoured the area, eating into the layers of basalt that covered the area over 15 million years ago. As we visit these areas, we suddenly find ourselves amongst familiar water-induced formations that are almost unrecognizable due to their sheer gigantic scale—we are suddenly reduced to Lilliputians!
Whilst some of us chose to take kayaks down the river, others took Zodiac cruises and took a short bus trip to the Palouse Falls. These are still spectacular, but they are dwarfed by the ghost of falls past, as the bed and pool were obviously created by water masses well over a hundred times the volume of the present falls.
More signs of the unique geology of the region were encountered as we sailed on downstream after lunch, and encountered some spectacular columnar basalts, formed on the slow cooling of liquid lava. These fan out in many different directions, depending on the curvature of the cooling surface below, creating a natural work of art in the cliffs.
Once through Lower Monumental Dam, we gathered in the lounge, where Smithsonian lecturer Andrew Gulliford gave us a fascinating history of the long and turbulent relationship between mankind and salmon in the Pacific Northwest—an issue that is still so controversial to this day that a great question-and-answer session arose once he was done. After learning more about the unparalleled geology of the region at recap tonight, we had a great dinner as we proceeded on down the Snake and Columbia Rivers.
