June 2026 – Meandering on the Way

June 25, 2026

Meandering on the Way — June 12 to 22, 2026

Friday, June 12, 2026

We drove up to the Portland airport today to catch a flight to Salt Lake City. Traffic was terrible. Plus, our flight was delayed for an hour. Bah! Once in SLC, though, life was fine. Cousin L picked us up at the airport and took us to Heber City to start our quick visit there.

Saturday, June 13, 2026

L and J have changed houses since we saw them last, and it was nice to see their new place. It’s larger and closer to town than their previous house, which was perched on a mountain slope. The new property is semi-rural and large enough to have a horse. There’s no horse at the moment, but the property did come with a semi-feral cat named Tuhaye, who is gradually warming to the new inhabitants.

After breakfast, we set out to see something of the Heber Valley. First we did a tour of a dairy farm, a relatively small operation that produces milk mostly for the cheese factory just down the road, which is owned by the same family. Ancestors of the current owners came to the Heber Valley from Switzerland in the 1870’s. Many other Swiss also came and for a century or so the main agricultural activity in the area was dairy farming. These days most of the dairies are gone, their land sold to developers.

The farm we visited has been operating at its present site since the 1920’s. Here is the original milk house dating from that era:

We got to look inside the old building and our tour guide told us a little about how dairying changed over the years. One early innovation was to create what were called milking pits, areas that were three or four feet lower than the main level of the stalls, thus allowing the milkers to do their work without having to bend down to reach the udders. Then came milking machines. This building was still in use when they came along. The milking schedule in the old days was simple: once at 3:00 AM and once again at 3:00 PM. Why those times? Milking at 3:00 AM would give the kids time to do their work and still get to school on time. Milking at 3:00 PM meant the kids would again be available once school was over. How did our guide know this? Because that’s how he grew up and eventually became a fourth generation farmer/owner/dairy manager.

These days the children of the family do not have the opportunity to work two milking shifts a day 365 days a year. No one else has that opportunity either. In this dairy, the cows can choose to be milked whenever they want and the actual milking is done by robots. Cows also have access to self-activating back scratching machines like the one in the photo below.

Each cow’s collar shows its number and also carries its electronic ID. When a cow wants to be milked she goes into a milking stall, which opens automatically as she starts to enter and then shuts behind her once she is in. A 3D camera and a robotic milking machine do the rest. The robot records how much milk is collected and sends that data to the central database. The cow is then given a molasses-covered nutrient pellet and the stall opens up in front of her so she can leave. Meanwhile the milking robot scans the milk for impurities–especially blood from mastitis. If there are problems, all of the milk from that session is discarded. And of course that information is also sent to the computer and the farm manager will receive an alert. Cows are allowed to enter a milking stall up to five times per day. On the sixth try, however, the computer will automatically tell the stall not to let them in. Why, you might ask, would a cow want to be milked more than five times in a day? According to our host, it is most likely the molasses.

Here’s the nerve center of the operation:

The windows here overlook the dairy barn. For closer views, the black monitor high up on the wall is capable of showing images from up to thirty-six different cameras. This was not part of the tour per se, but our farmer host did invite us to go up to the administrative level and look around if we wanted. We took this picture from the doorway.

Near the office there is a training/seminar room and also a kind of public viewing area. The viewing area also has windows overlooking the barn level, but, unfortunately, they were some of the dirtiest windows we’ve ever seen. We took a picture anyway:

The black line in the behind the cows is a track that allows the operation of automatic scrapers. These are run several times a day to push manure out of the barn.

This is where the cows spend pretty much all their time. The building is open-walled during the warmer parts of the year. In the winter there is a system that unfolds thick fabric shutters to cover the wall openings. Our host told us that the building was originally designed to allow the cows to have access to the adjoining open pasture anytime they wanted. It was found, though, that the cows rarely went into the pasture, at least partly because the barn was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. So after a year or two, pasture access was shut off. Hmm. The maximum capacity of the barn is 250 cows, but their current operation involves just under 150.

After the tour, we had another hayride back to the creamery, where we hoped to sample one of their famous grilled cheese sandwiches. Alas, the sandwich line was long and the space was small. We decided to move along to a resort complex called The Homestead, where we could get a meal and then check out the Homestead Crater.

From the outside, the crater is a cone-shaped formation that looks like a small volcano, maybe fifty or sixty feet high. It has an open crater and if you take the stairs up to the top, you can look down into it. The circular opening is about 20 feet across and has been covered with a sturdy safety net of chain link fence fabric painted black. But if you look down just right, you’ll see reflections off of some kind lake or pool far below. You might also hear splashing sounds as if some kind of largish animals were playing in the lake. As shown by the following series of photos, that’s because there is a swimming pool down there.

The interior pool is 60 feet deep and is fed by an underground hot spring that keeps the water at a steady 95 degrees in all seasons. Pretty neat. Would it have been even nicer if people had refrained from messing with it and just allowed the spring to keep flowing out of the top, depositing its load of dissolved limestone and gradually enlarging the cone, the way it had been doing for a millennium or two? Maybe. Maybe not.

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Today L and J took us to the Heber airport. It’s a small one; the only runway is less than 7000 feet long, too short for commercial airliners. But it was a pretty busy place on this Sunday afternoon. Every ten minutes or so we’d hear the roar and rush of another private jet taking off. Was it always like this? Not really. This was a weekly rush hour caused by lots of folks headed home after spending a couple of days in their mountain retreats. Friday afternoons are busy too because that’s when the weekenders arrive. There’s a lot of hanger space at the Heber airport and J told us that some of the hangers contain small apartments. That way, the pilots who fly the families in on Friday will have a place to stay until they fly them out again on Sunday.

But conspicuous consumption wasn’t what we really came to see. We were there to visit the Commemorative Air Force: Utah Wing Museum. The museum contains several vintage aircraft and a large collection of air war related paraphrenalia: maps, uniforms, survival equipment, cockpit instruments, notebooks, memoirs, mission logs, and other offficial documents. A local Heber Valley man piloted a B-29 in the latter stages of WW2, and a number of his items have been donated. Nearby is a display concerning a different B-29, the one that dropped the first atomic bomb. Included in the exhibit is a facsimile copy of the written orders that gave the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509th Composite Unit the final go ahead to deliver the bomb. Those orders list four possible target cities, leaving the final choice up to the unit commander, who was to base the decision on weather conditions.

Among the equipment on display is a Rolls Royce Griffon V-12 airplane engine of the kind that powered Spitfire and Mustang fighter aircraft in the later stages of WW2. Here’s a nice picture of a refurbished Griffon, which is of course something that everyone should own at least one of. Unfortunately, the photo comes from an old web page and the engine shown is no longer for sale. So even if you have $65,000 rattling around somewhere, you’re still out of luck. But hey, that kind of money would buy you a reasonably nice weekend in Heber Valley where you could see the Griffon that we saw. Donation requested but not required.

Just outside the museum, we had a chance to poke around a real WW2 era aircraft. We can say categorically that it would not be a fun place to work or an easy place to escape from if it was going down, especially if you were assigned to one of the machine gun seats.

This plane appears to be a Lockheed PV-1 Ventura (aka B-34). The lettering indicates that it was used in the Attu campaign in the Aleutians, the island chain that stretches out nearly a thousand miles from the southwest coast of Alaska. In June of 1942 the Japanese occupied two islands near the end of the chain. The United States recaptured them in May of 1943. This particular plane would have been involved in that latter phase.

Monday, June 15, 2026

Time to fly back to Portland. Again, our Alaska Airlines flight was an hour late getting airborne. Aarg! On the other hand, the Monday traffic through Portland was a lot easier to deal with than Friday’s.

Thursday, June 18, 2026

We went down to the Corvallis Arts Center today. Our friend B has some paintings on exhibition there. B gave a short talk and answered questions about his techniques and what he hopes to convey. Very interesting.

Saturday, June 20, 2026

We took the old roadster out today, first packing a little lunch and then heading to Hiatt Farms to buy some baked goods. That accomplished, we continued south down to Bellfountain Park where we could have our picnic. The little beamer is running like a champ, running so well in fact that we may have exceeded the speed limit slightly at some point. As soon as we realized what had happened, we of course throttled back to a sedate 55 or so. This was a good idea because just a few moments later we met a sheriff’s deputy coming from the opposite direction. Bellfountain Park was crowded, but we still found a table with mixed sun and shade–just right.

Monday, June 22, 2026

M took our friend C for her annual birthday ride in the red car, cruising out Decker Road and then up a very interesting part of Highway 34. Beautiful weather for it and no police cars were seen. After the ride, E met them for coffee.

June 11, 2026June 11, 2026

Meandering on the Way — June 1 to 9, 2026

Monday, June 1st

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. But a journey of 1300 miles starts with spending $100 for an oil change and then $85 for a tank of gas. Then you have to pack up your stuff. Then you have to rest.

Tuesday, June 2nd

After a night of rest, M made some sandwiches and then finally got on the road. He was headed up into Washington to pay some more attention to the scablands–the areas affected by the great Missoula floods that occurred during the latter phases of the Ice Age. E, meanwhile, was forced to miss this grand tour so she could attend to a host of engagements and appointments. Luckily for her, M made an extra sandwich and left it for her in the fridge. She was most appreciative of this and even forgave M for locking her out of the house when he left.

M took I-5 to Portland and then I-84 east as far as Biggs. There he exited onto U.S. Hwy 97, turned north and crossed the Columbia River into Washington. As the highway climbed up out of the gorge, he stopped at an old viewpoint, one that looks like it was designed and built in simpler times, perhaps sixty or seventy years ago. Old as it is, this stretch of U.S. 97 was not the first paved road to climb this long slope from the bottom of the gorge up to the rim. The earlier road, older and narrower, was in fact the first macadam highway in all of the Pacific Northwest. It was built between 1909 and 1913 by Samuel Hill, a lawyer, businessman and world traveller. Hill believed strongly in the need for good inter-city highways and paid for the road himself, largely to demonstrate how paved roads could transform vehicular travel and transportation. The demonstration was so successful that by 1913, a new era of publicly funded highways had begun.

Though eventually replaced by U.S. 97, much of Hill’s prototype highway still exists. It is closed to motorized vehicles but open to pedestrians and cyclists. Here’s what the area looks like from the air.

Hill’s road is on the right and the current Highway 97 is on the left. The viewpoint loop where M stopped to take his pictures can be seen beside 97 in the upper left. There was no one there at the viewpoint when this picture was taken, and in fact, as far as we know, no one ever stops there except M.

Although both roads climb the same slope, Hill’s 113-year-old road has more low speed turns and a much gentler overall grade. This should not surprise us: it was engineered for the motor vehicles of his era, which were far slower and less powerful than later ones.

The Columbia Gorge is one of the windiest places in Oregon and now hosts dozens (hundreds?) of wind turbines.

By the time M got up out of the gorge it was…lunchtime. Siri found him a nice park in Goldendale. Thank goodness for parks. Or more precisely, let’s be thankful that some sufficient number of human beings like parks enough to think that we ought to spend public tax money to create and maintain them.

Of course central Washington is not all parks, which is good because that would be boring. Here’s a place just south of the town of Toppenish. It’s also pretty nice…

…but again, we should probably be grateful that not all of Central Washington looks like this.

After lunch M drove up to Ellensburg, where he bought another $85 worth of gas. How far is it from Corvallis to Ellensburg, you might ask. Well…most sources say that the driving distance is 306 miles. In fact all the sources say that, except one. While M was checking those various sources, an AI popped up to offer a more complete answer:

Could that possibly be true? Should we spend some time trying to imagine a universe where it would be true? No, we need to move along. From Ellensburg M turned east and drove to Ephrata, WA where he checked in to a motel.

Hey, wait a minute! Wasn’t Ephrata the town where the guy was arrested last January for stealing body parts from the cemetery, storing them in his house, and distributing them online? No! That was Ephrata, Pennsylvania, not Ephrata, WA. Whew! Now where were we? Oh yes, geology.

Ephrata, WA has given its name to a geologic feature called the Ephrata Fan. To explain the fan, we have to start around sixteen million years ago, a time of intense volcanic activity over large areas of present day Washington, Idaho and Oregon. The lava that emerged from the earth at this time was highly liquid. Instead of building up large cone-shaped mountains, it just oozed up from the ground and flowed outward, covering the surrounding area with a new layer of rock from 80 to 300 feet in thickness. One hundred and seventy-five of such vents have been identified in Washington state alone. Over a period of several million years, the cumulative effect of these flows was to cover the whole area with a layer of rock that in some places was many thousands of feet thick. The weight of all this new rock–called basalt–was so great that it caused the granite layers beneath it to actually sink farther down into the earth.

When this great upflow of lava finally ceased–about six million years ago–the result was a vast gently rolling landscape. The bedrock has since been covered with layers of gravel, sand and soil, but the current landscape still follows the contours of the underlying basalt flows. More on that later.

But now we skip ahead to a mere fifteen thousand years ago, a time when the great Ice Ages were gradually coming to an end. That process created a series of massive ice dams in northern Idaho and Montana. When one of these dams failed, huge quantities of water would suddenly flow eastward and down into Washington. Wherever they flowed they would immediately wash away all the loose gravel and soil and then begin to erode the basalt. The result of some of that erosion is what M came to see.

Wednesday, June 3rd

The town of Ephrata is twenty miles from the mouth of what is called the Grand Coulee, which is one of the huge channels that resulted when the late Ice Age floods cut their way through the highlands on their way to finding the sea. As M drove up from Ephrata toward the coulee, he found himself in a wide, flat area, much of which looked like this:

Vast quantities of large rocks were deposited here by the floods. What you see here is just the top of a layer of boulders over a hundred feet thick.

Here’s the biggest visible rock. Named Monster Rock, it is estimated to weigh about 1500 tons.

But why were all these rocks dropped here? And why is the area in which they were dropped shaped like a fan? After flowing many miles through a relatively narrow channel, the Ice Age flood waters came out onto a vast open area. At that point the flood spread out into a fan shape, becoming shallower and losing some momentum. The floodwaters were carrying huge amounts of eroded materials. As the current slowed, the largest rocks fell to the bottom first while smaller sized sediments were carried farther along. This created something like a large river delta–except on land. Geologists call it the Ephrata Fan.

Today, there is soil on top of the rock layer and in a few places farmers have been able to dig up the rocks and push them aside to the edges of the field. This is similar to New England fieldstone walls, except that these rocks are two, three or four feet in diameter and can only be moved with heavy machinery. Or, as M observed in one case, a clever farmer could leave all the rocks in place but irrigate the land with giant sprinklers. What would that do? Make the rocks grow even bigger? Naw. M assumes that the farmer was growing grass between the rocks to create pastureland.

Eventually M passed by the small town of Soapville and started up Hwy 17 into the mouth of the Grand Coulee. Eventually he got up into the main part of the coulee, where he saw the sights and did some hiking. One of his hikes took him up to the coulee rim, where he took the photo below. It shows the view looking back down the coulee in the direction he had just come. In the background you can see the nearly vertical coulee walls where the floods chewed away hundreds of feet of ten-million-year-old basalt. Above the cliffs you can glimpse some of the gently rolling countryside that the old lava flows created and which still exists over much of eastern Washington.

Later in the day M explored both the lower and upper sections of the Grand Coulee, partly by road and partly on foot. What he found there is pretty interesting–if you like that sort of thing–maybe interesting enough to merit a separate posting. We will pass it by for the moment. M finished the day with a quick visit to Grand Coulee Dam and a longish drive to Spokane. Arriving there at rush hour was quite a shock after a day of empty spaces. He made it to his hotel–but just barely.

So, you might be thinking, was anything going on in Washington besides sage brush and old rocks? Well, as it happens, M did manage to drop by a fishing hole on the western edge of the fan. He himself doesn’t fish, but he found others there who do.

Thursday, June 4th

From Spokane M headed south, aiming for a place called Steptoe Butte. Steptoe is a rarity for this area–a landform created by an actual volcanic cone. It is only about four million years old, much younger than the underlying basalt. It rises 1200 feet above its surroundings. M drove to the top. It was an arduous drive but quite worthwhile. The weather was very fine and the summit is the perfect place to see the landscape of rolling hills and wavelike patterns that were shaped by those ten to sixteen million year old lava flows.

The first photo in the series above is the view to the south; the last photo is the view to the northwest. As you see, the northwest area hosts a fairly extensive wind farm. While he was at the top of Steptoe, M chatted with an old farmer who had also come up to enjoy the view. He lived just a few miles south of the butte and was very pleased that the people of his county had put through regulations that effectively prevented the erection of wind turbines in their area. Comparing the two views–south and northwest–you couldn’t blame him. He also asserted that wind turbines were useless anyway since they never produced enough power to justify their initial cost. Darn. How did he figure that out? Wasn’t that supposed to be a secret?

From Steptoe M continued south to Pullman, WA and thence to Lewiston, ID. M had never seen Lewiston before. It turned out to be a fairly ordinary settlement in an extraordinarily beautiful setting. M found his way through Lewiston (and neighboring Clarkston) and got himself onto Hwy 129 going south toward Oregon. Then, in the seemingly innocent small town of Asotin, disaster struck. Foolishly confident that he was still headed south, M actually veered off to the west. After a while the pavement ended and soon he found himself nudging his truck through a herd of cattle who were also traveling down the road in a westerly direction. A little while after that the rolling hills turned in roller coaster hills…

…and M began to think something was wrong.

In the end M left farming country and ended up making a quick tour of Umatilla National Forest. By the time he got back to his proper road at the town of Anatone, he had wasted a couple of hours and a certain amount of expensive gas. Not that the Umatilla National Forest wasn’t nice. It was beautiful. It was also totally deserted, which M likes, and in the area where he stopped to eat his lunch, he got a pretty good view.

Fortunately, M had gotten up early enough and driven through Umatilla National Forest fast enough that he still had time to get to his campground at Wallowa Lake. On the way there he stopped at a wayside on Oregon Hwy 3, which turned out to give a view of what our maps now call Joseph Creek Canyon.

This canyon was one of the places where the Chief Joseph Band of the Nez Perce had their traditional winter home. In the bottom of the canyon wintertime temperatures are considerably warmer than in the surrounding highlands. Here the Nez Perce built semi-permanent structures and cached large quantities of camas bulbs for use in times of famine. During the time of troubles with the whites the band left the area and were never able to return. Chief Joseph himself seems to have been an extraordinary person who was much admired by friend and foe alike. His image still haunts the northwest.

Friday, June 5th

A day of driving, eight and a half hours. Breakfast cooked on the Coleman in the campground, lunch at a rest stop off I-84 in the gorge, dinner at home.

Saturday, June 6th

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day–June 6, 1944. We marked the occasion by going to an actual big screen multiplex and watching Pressure, a movie about D-Day that focuses on the weather. Specifically, how did Eisenhower know if the weather was going to be good enough to allow the invasion to take place on June 6th? The film closely follows actual events. The story is almost certainly overdramatized, but not–thank goodness–oversimplified. Brendon Fraser plays Eisenhower, Kerry Condon plays his aide and long time companion Kay Summersby, and Andrew Scott plays the central role of James Stagg, the British meteorologist who had to make what might be history’s most fateful weather forecast. All three actors do good work here and we liked the film a lot.

And speaking of things WW2ish, here’s an Irving Berlin song from that era. This version was recorded on April 9, 1941, at a time when Britain was already at war but the United States was not.

Monday, June 8th

A day of mundane errands, gardening and grocery shopping. There was only one event of significance, as documented below.

Tuesday, June 9th

Family member A has qualified to join a team of Vancouver sim drivers to participate in an international virtual racing series. Races are streamed live every Tuesday, but are also available for later viewing. To follow Andy’s progress, go to Pit Road Productions on YouTube and look for Shop v Shop Imola Round 2 or Shop v Shop Watkins Glen Round 1.

June 11, 2026June 11, 2026

Two Hikes in the Lower Grand Coulee – June, 2026

M spent only one day exploring the Grand Coulee, which wasn’t nearly enough. Most of this limited time was spent on two hikes, both of them in the area of Sun Lakes Dry Falls State Park. He chose these on the basis of information in a wonderful book by Bruce Bjornstad called On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods–The Northern Reaches. Bjornstad’s guide includes a great deal of geological information as well as detailed instructions about how to get to places where you can see real examples. M is very grateful to his neighbor M for telling him about the book. It is out of print, but used copies are available here and there. On this trip M carried a copy from the Corvallis Benton County Library.

Hike #1 – Caribou Trail

Accessible from State Park Road, this trail starts in the bottom of the coulee and climbs up to the east rim, offering a nice long distance view down the Grand Coulee and also providing a good angle to see what is called the Pothole Field on the coulee floor. Not far from the trailhead the route passes just a few feet from the edge of one on these holes.

It’s hard to say how deep this hole is because the bottom is obscured by a heavy growth of small trees and shrubs, probably because it’s a little damper down there than up on the surface. It looks like the hole goes down only about 12 feet.

From a little farther up the trail you can see that there are many such holes in the coulee bottom, some of them more circular than others. Bjornstad says that the deeper ones go down 30 feet or more.

It is thought that the potholes were created by the end of ice age floods, but what was the mechanism? If we can imagine the coulee full to the brim with a rushing river 400 feet deep, we might next try to imagine what things might be like at the bottom of that river as it falls down over a 400 foot cliff, as it does at the spot now known as Dry Falls. There would have been a tremendous amount of erosion going on and also a tremendous amount of turbulence. Geologists now believe that this environment created underwater whirlpools, whose erosive force drilled down into the basalt.

About halfway along its length the Caribou Trail makes a hard right turn and enters a side canyon–a very rare break in the normally vertical coulee walls. At the top, as Bjornstad explains, hikers have to leave the trail and stroll left across a field of rocks and grass to get to the coulee rim. There are a number of great views there, including this one looking back south down the coulee.

To see the scale of things, try to find M’s silver pickup parked at the trailhead. It’s just a speck at the end of a barely visible road just to the left of the center of the photo. Now imagine a giant river running through here from right to left, a river flowing at about sixty miles an hour and so deep that it filled the channel all the way up to the top of the coulee walls.

Another thing you can see in the photo is how erosion has revealed the layer cake nature of the basalt. Each layer was laid down by a separate eruption event, with each of these events occurring hundreds of thousands of years apart–maybe millions. The period of greatest volcanic activity is said to have been from 16 million years ago up until 8 million years ago, so there was plenty of time for long pauses between layers. Also visible in the photo are a few potholes over on the right.

Hike #2 — Umatilla Rock Trail

Accessible from another branch of State Park Road, this trail starts at the base of Umatilla Rock and continues alongside that formation north up the coulee toward Dry Falls. Umatilla Rock is a striking feature–a long narrow strand of basalt that somehow remained after the rock on either side had been eroded away. It is an example of what are called rock blades or goat islands.

This is the south end of the Umatilla Rock formation. Behind what you can see here, the rock extends north for nearly a mile.

The trail goes along the right side of formation and makes for an interesting journey.

This photo shows a part of the Umatilla formation that extends north from the base. It also shows where a person might finally find a rock smooth enough sit down on and have lunch.

And here’s a view in the opposite direction, showing the area of coulee bottom that lies between the Umatilla formation and the opposite wall of the water channel.

More irregular outcroppings along the way.

Eventually the trail crosses to the other side of the coulee where you can get a closer look at the west facing walls. Here’s photo from there. Notice that there are various shapes and patterns in the layers of basalt that the erosion has exposed. We also see a gravel slope at the base of the upper wall. This gravel, which Zentner called talus, comes from natural weathering processes that have occurred in the millennia that have passed since the floods occurred. During flood times, the talus wouldn’t have been there; it would all have been bare rock, scrubbed clean.

Although basalt is hard rock, it is more easily eroded than most other types of rock. This is due to the fact that it is formed by cooling lava. Lava does not cool evenly. Instead the process of cooling causes cracks to form, lots of cracks. Geologists have distinguished three or four different types of cracking, each of which forms a different looking basalt. In the center of the above photo, you can see one of the more spectacular kinds of basalt cracks–long vertical ones. When this kind of basalt is sliced open by erosion, the result is what appears to be a multitude of rock columns. Nick Zentner says that basalt comes pre-cut, like it was specially designed to fall apart into smaller pieces if you put pressure on it. In the case of the Grand Coulee, the floods would have applied plenty of pressure. They would then have whisked the loose pieces away and deposited them thirty miles south somewhere in the Ephrata fan.

The Umatilla Rock Trail also leads to views of Dry Falls, which many think is the most impressive feature of the whole system. The rim of Dry Falls is 400 feet above the coulee floor and three and a half miles wide. Over this rim flowed the great floods. You might think that this would have created quite a waterfall. But if we try to imagine it, we have to remember that the floodwaters flowing toward the falls were themselves hundreds of feet deep. So if we could have seen it all from above, it might have looked more like some large scale splashing and major turbulence rather than an actual waterfall. (Would a good kayaker been able to run it? Hmm. Maybe a really big kayaker.) Click the link to see a very nice photo of what Dry Falls looks like now–in the winter.

For more information, do check out Nick Zentner, who teaches Geology at Central Washington University. Known for his PBS series Nick on the Rocks, he has also made a large number of YouTube videos. One that is especially relevant to the Grand Coulee is Dry Falls and Palouse Falls. The falls may be dry, but Nick is not! And finally, if you don’t know him already, you might want to learn about J Harlen Bretz, the person who first understood what must have happened so long ago to create the Central Washington landscapes we see today.