Lakes

As I've said many a time, I live in a landscape that most people would call barren, that cattlemen would call rangeland, and that farmers gave up on because of sparse soil and too damned many rocks.  Basalt.

9 to 17 million years ago the North American continental plate was so far east compared to where it is now that the Pacific Coast was somewhere along the Idaho Panhandle and the region in which I live, the Palouse, was sitting directly over the "hot spot" that currently sits under Yellowstone.  Yes, we formerly sat atop a supervolcano for several million years.

Well, guess what happens when a supervolcano erupts?  Thousands of square miles of lava, 30 to 50 meters deep, spreads out over the land, destroying habitat and creating what must have looked like another planet -- miles of nothing but barren, black, smoldering lava that would slowly over time harden into basalt.  Then centuries, thousands, millions of years of dust blowing in on the wind, creating a topsoil that originally was several hundred feet deep.  Still is, in places.  Such soil makes this area one of the most fertile wheat-producing regions in the entire world.

So much lava erupted from this "hot spot" super volcano over a period of several million years that the entire Columbia basin is covered by thick layers of basalt, which are so heavy they bent the earth's crust, and this whole side of the state from the middle over to Idaho, and the southern 50% of the east side, slopes all the way down to the Columbia River.  Think of a giant bowl.  That's what the southeastern part of Washington state is, emptying into the Snake River, which empties into the Columbia River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean.

The continental plate continued to drift but it must have been at an angle rather than directly west, because where I live now sits about 500 miles west of Yellowstone's hot spot, whereas the Idaho border -- formerly the West Coast of America -- is maybe 400 miles from the ocean.

All that hundreds of feet of topsoil sitting above that basalt got washed away, again covering an area from Spokane over to the middle of the state and all the way down to the Columbia, in a cataclysm very similar to the super volcano's eruptions.  A massive flood that emptied an Ice Age lake up around Missoula that was a couple of thousand feet deep and said to be as large as lakes Erie and Huron combined, all came rushing down from the Clark Fork River in Idaho, where a massive glacier ice dam had backed up the lake.  Either the pressure of all that water was too much or it floated the ice dam until it broke.  A torrent of water that held 10 times all the water in all the rivers on Earth today -- think of that! -- came flooding down and covered about third of Washington state, moving so fast and in such volume that it literally scoured the earth bare and blasted basalt rock away, creating eddy patterns in the earth and the rock itself.

My buddy Steve and I were trying this week to imagine what this landscape looked like prior to the floods.  Because I can tell you what it looks like now.  Mesas dot the landscape, and you'll notice that all the mesas stand the same height, which means that they used to be ground level.  Everything below, all those sculpted canyons of scab rock, as we called it as kids, long river channels, waterfalls larger than Niagra, vast backed-up lakes, and the Columbia gorge deepened further as this incredible volume of water moved unrelentingly towards the sea.

I think this was a flat, vast prairie much like the Midwest.  It seems to extend from about mid eastern Washington, through eastern Oregon, all the way down into the great central valley of northern California.

Steve, his wife Ann, and I all went fishing a couple of days ago on a lake that was probably created by those Ice Age floods.  It's about fifteen miles long, at least four hundred feet deep in places as the channel was fashioned by the flood, and bordered on both sides by massive basalt cliffs.  The basalt came in several different layers -- or several different eruptions -- and you can see them stacked one atop another.  Each layer, as I said, is maybe 30 to 50 meters high.  At least four different layers, sometimes five, all about of the same depth and stacked on top on each other, building to the last, or top, layer creating a bluff several hundred feet high.  

So there's rarely a shoreline along this lake, but instead these sheer cliffs.  If you bring your boat close to the cliff wall you can see how the water scoured the rock and literally tore it apart as it ripped and roared through the channel it was carving.

Because there is really no shoreline to this lake, there's nowhere to build, which has been a fortunate occurrence because there are no resorts on the lake and no cranky landowners forbidding anyone to dare trespass on their little stretch of beach.  Just miles of bluffs.  Occasionally you can spot a portion of a wheatfield way up on top.  Wouldn't want to lose my brakes when navigating that field way up there.

Anyway, down at the southern end of the lake there is of course an exiting creek and a couple of makeshift boat launches.  There are always about a half dozen vehicles parked there.  It's popular with fishermen, kayakers, and water-skiers.  I've rarely ever seen people water skiing on the lake.  It's usually the more bucolic boaters trolling the middle of the lake for trout or nearing the rock walls for bass.

We were in the middle.  Steve and Ann fished off either side of the back of the boat and I steered while we trolled.  All the modern gizmos showed us the depth of the fish (about twenty feet) and the shallower regions of the lake that I steered clear of.  It was hot but late afternoon.  Tank top and shorts type weather.  Sandals or clogs on bare feet.  The dog perched atop the bow, alert to every bird on the lake.  Steve and Ann batted .666 -- they caught six fish, but lost three just as they were trying to net them.  It was a friendly interfamily competition which Steve won, 4-2.  All together, about ten pounds of fish.  The dog pawed them in the creel and drank her fill of the water.

Just a few days before, there had been a 1,200 acre fire along the west side of the exiting creek so there was lots of ash and debris in the water.  There's just something about being in a boat on the water that's calming, given good weather.  The conditions were mostly windless with an occasional, thankful breeze.  Almost glassy.  We spent about four hours on the lake, which is only seventeen miles from the house, so is easy to get to.  I grew up about 5-6 miles southeast of this lake and went to junior high in an old brick school house a mile or two south of the lake.  Where my mother had gone and graduated with the class of '37,  My 8th grade class was the last graduating class of the school before it closed and consolidated.  The class of '67.  The school's torn down now, more's the pity.  It was an interesting, three-storey building with a full, sloped theater on the top floor, where we staged the plays I wrote and lip synced to the latest Beatles hits.

Steve was having trouble with the motor so had been working on that for a few days.  We took the boat out for a trial run last night, this time on a lake that's about 13 miles north.  It's a very different lake, incredibly shallow (about twenty feet throughout), maybe five miles long, with a couple of run-down resorts and one small campground.  The state maintains a really nice boat launch so we put in there and did a 30-40 minute tour of the lake, engine wide open.  Still not working quite right.  A lot of wildlife.  Several group of pelicans.  Deer standing in the water along the shores, drinking their fill after another hot day.  Two cormorants booked by us like we were standing still.  We were doing 26 mph and they quickly sped by so they must have been flying at least 35 mph.

Steve and Ann were going to take the boat and go camping down along the Snake River this Tuesday but alas, something's still amiss with the engine so that trip's off.  I would have stayed home with the dog and fed the cattle.  Will still do that one day this week while my friends do an overnight fishing trip with another couple who live about forty miles north.  That's close in this neck of the -- well, basalt. 

And such is my life at the moment.  In between the boating trips I did two solo days where I broke down, off-loaded, stored and stacked eight pallets of freight entirely by myself.  I don't mind working alone but that is quite a workout for me.  My back is stronger but boy, does it ache.  Alleve is my friend.

And that's it.  Life on the farm.  Today's an off day, so will mostly read, rest, write, and maybe go in search of a cup of joe and a Sunday paper.  Ta.