Etched in stone | Scene One: Erosion
Here is the first of a four-part series by Brad Trumbo that encapsulates the ethos of Raconteur Magazine –storytelling rooted in landscape and experience.
The sun’s steep angle, dry heat, and sharp beam greeted me as I stepped upon the rain-starved soil. The remnants of cheatgrass stems crunched beneath my boot, having senesced five months prior. A puff of the fine particulate loess soil billowed from underfoot. Ahead, a long coulee traversed the hardened edge of a chocolate-toned basalt rim nearly hidden by a remarkable stand of old-growth sagebrush – a remnant speck of Washington’s once vast shrub-steppe ecosystem.
Vibration radiated from the truck's back seat, where my Llewellin setter, Finn, quivered excitedly. Finn is a lightly-ticked, thin-coated orange belton beginning her tenth bird season at the time. We hunt central Washington’s “channeled scablands” for valley quail and Hungarian partridge (Huns), but mostly to experience time immemorial that is etched in stone.
Upon release, Finn dashed ahead like a young pup, clearing a rusted barbed wire coil that had seen so many moons that the barbs were worn round. The forgotten relics of a cattle loading chute were barely recognizable, having weathered into vertical shards alongside the barbed wire. The chute had likely not guided a cow for nearly a century. Wood and wire break down slowly in the arid climate. The abundance of amber lichen blotching the splintered posts was another testament to their age.
“Who was running cattle on this ground that long ago?” I thought. “Perhaps it wasn’t public back then. Can’t imagine the Indians would have needed a cattle chute.”
Finn blazed ahead into the sea of solemn sagebrush. My eyes were fixed on the coulee rim ahead and a small yet prominent hump in the shallow soil that stretched between us and the bare basalt. We would skirt to the right of the hump, then move into the coulee and follow the terrain down.
As I entered the waist-high sage, approximately four feet on my large frame, a profound ambiance enclosed me in something of an embrace. Finn was working ahead somewhere, hidden beneath the sagebrush canopy. Tunnel vision swept over me as I searched for a hint of my little white setter.
A flash of white ahead at two o’clock tugged at reality enough to break my trance, but the landscape held me in its clutches and seemed to guide Finn and me as though we were on a tour and taking in the sights.
My Garmin handheld receiver beeped, alerting me to Finn being on point about 40 yards out and still in the two-o’clock direction. She stood at the edge of a small precipice at the toe of the hump.
Circling Finn for a head-on flush sent a covey of Huns squirting out the back door nearly 20 yards to my right. Their cacophonous chirps and hammering wings startled me into pivoting on my right heel and swinging through the lead bird as it raced for a rise to the north. Upon the left barrel report, I saw the rear bird fold and fall. Continuing the swing, the right barrel discharged without consequence.
As the powder burn echoed from the coulee wall, Finn and I moved into the sagebrush where the single Hun had fallen. The bird had folded stone dead on the wing, so I expected a relatively quick retrieve. Instead, we scoured the area for half an hour without so much as a feather to show.
Finn eventually moved into the coulee. I reluctantly followed, still wrestling with the unknown fate of that beautiful Hun, but my cogitation was broken in short order by a canyon floor wetland rich with green and golden grasses punctuating the dark basalt of the coulee wall. The scene revealed the timeless tale of water following the path of least resistance.
The coulee was carved by flood water coursing between the dense canyon walls. Still, no ordinary flows cut coulees and scoured lakes across more than 10,000 square miles of central Washington. The carving of the channeled scablands is a geologic marvel with an extraterrestrial appearance; its story is owed to the independent work of two visionary geologists in the early 1900s.
Interestingly, J. Harlan Bretz was no geologist at first. He held a bachelor’s degree in biology. He taught high school history and physiography in Seattle until the scablands grabbed his attention and held on for the remainder of his life. Upon earning his Ph.D. in and teaching geology at the University of Chicago, Bretz began intensively studying his scablands muse.
At the time, the geology community accepted that water-carved landscapes were formed by gradual erosive processes over eons, not events of biblical proportion. Contrary to the rule, Bretz’s theory included flood waters surging through central Washinton from the Spokane area west with such force that the scablands were created equivalent to being carved in a day relative to geologic time. The geology community dismissed Bretz’s “Spokane Flood” theory, but another geologist concurrently studied a related flood mystery on the Montana prairie.
Joseph Pardee, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, noticed ripple marks resembling a river bend sandbar on the Camas Prairie's high ground, suggesting that water once covered the land and receded quickly. Additionally, a high water mark was identified along the Pengelly Trail on Mount Sentinel at 4,200 feet elevation overlooking Missoula to the west. These discoveries led to the “Lake Missoula” theory.
Lake Missoula was a 2,000-foot-deep glacial lake formed by ice damming the Clark Fork River. Over several thousand years during the last ice age, geologists estimate that the ice dam ruptured and reformed more than 40 times, sending up to 600 cubic miles of water powering through central Washington in as little as two days; hence, the rippled Montana prairie and the deep carving and gouging of the scablands. When Pardee published his Lake Missoula theory in 1947, Bretz’s “Spokane Flood” theory suddenly seemed plausible.
While the scablands appear hard, jagged, prickly, brown, and bone dry much of the year, the richness of the landscape is grossly understated. Hundreds of wildlife species call the scablands home. The pock-marked scour holes have filled with water from the Bureau of Reclamation’s “Columbia Basin Project,” which routes Columbia River water south from Grand Coulee Dam into Banks Lake. From Banks Lake, the water flows through a series of small coulees and groundwater channels, providing irrigation water to the scablands before returning to the Columbia River in Pasco, Washington .
Hundreds of lakes and ponds support rainbow trout, a thousand miles of wetland shorelines, and seeps teeming with waterfowl and songbirds. Red-winged blackbirds sing like a squealing, rusted gate hinge from the tawny spikes of last year’s phragmites. Meadowlarks warble from the sagebrush and fence wires. Mule deer roam the coulee rims. Valley quail and ring-necked pheasant call from the wetland and cropland fringes. Golden eagles, ferruginous hawks, and short-eared owls sweep over the landscape. The spring green-up presents a blanket of flowers from cotton-topped common yarrow and vibrant canary balsamroot, to the tiny fuchsia buttons of Cusick's rockcress.
The landscape tugs at my deep curiosity about the geology and cultural history, and the story of people and processes that are locked away in sage and stone. There is much to be learned from the wax and wane of a flourishing spring and the silence of fall on a land that has seen only what modern humans can estimate but never truly grasp.
Finn and I traversed the flood scars along the bottom of the coulee, some toothy and irregular, and others smoothed by time and a fuzz of vegetation. Small buttes, semi-circular gouges with angular basalt rims, and towering columns of pentagonal columnar basalt surrounded us. The basalt pillars also wore a rich golden lichen veil and cast shadows on the wetlands below. Not one detail of the varied landscape is commonplace, yet the basalt pillars suggest intelligent and orderly design.
Valley quail calls hovered up from lower in the coulee, prodding me ahead, but not before placing a hand on the angular basalt column that towered above. As I grasped the rock’s edge, it felt as though the rock had grabbed back, like we had locked in a handshake. My hearing seemed dampened as if I had put on shooting muffs. A low, distant rumble erupted. The landscape had something to say.
Thinking I was delusional, I reigned Finn into my side and moved down the coulee with a keen ear to the wind. There was an active ranch a few miles off. “Must be cattle,” I thought.
Cattle ranches and horse-driven round-ups are alive in eastern Washington. While those of European descent operate many of the ranches, the scablands were once home to the Columbia-Sinkiuse People.
