The Narrative Image

When you first hear about how 15,000 years ago, glacial Lake Missoula broke free of its ice dam and raced across the Mid-Columbia Basin – some 500 cubic miles of water traveling at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour – you’re tempted to say bullshit. That’s what most scientists thought when J. Harlen Bretz first proposed his theory of a great “Spokane Flood” in the early 1920s. But 30 years later, after he and others collected more evidence, and after the advent of aerial photography made it possible to recognize giant “current ripples” in suspect landscapes, scientific opinion began its necessary shift. On a recent trip to the tri-cities, I spent time in the Horse Heaven Hills, south of Kennewick in order to see some of the evidence for ancient cataclysmic floods as laid out in Bruce Bjornstad’s guidebook, On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods. Evidently, the Horse Heaven Hills form the defining southern rim of the Mid Columbia ‘Basin’ and when the floods came, the only ...

See Also Mt. Adams / Bird Creek Meadows http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/09/mt-adams-bird-creek-meadows.html Hellroaring Canyon Overlook From 09-03-07 to 09-23-07 This time, determined to reach Iceberg Lake, I opted to take the Climber’s trail (number 20, I think) which follows the edge of the cliff overlooking Hellroaring Canyon. Above the viewpoint area, the grass told a very succinct story about dehydration. Even though I had a clearer idea of where I needed to go to reach the lake based on my scouting activities weeks earlier, I still found it difficult to follow the ‘trail’ when it veered off into the rocks. More than once, I found myself completely trail-less and in those instances, I used a simple strategy that I call, ‘go up’. Sometimes I would run across what appeared to be artificially stacked rocks – cairns – that I assumed were constructed to mark ‘the way’ for hikers and climbers. But it takes a little bit of faith to follow them (they could just as well be t...