Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.

Backroads: 155

About a minute south of 48 degrees, at a place where the Columbia makes a radical hook northward, the river and Grand Coulee converge. Finned and footed creatures have followed these natural paths ever since water fluid and frozen gouged them out of the Plateau. After an overland trek from Omak on the Okanogan to the Columbia (a section I've not yet traveled), route 155 lets the wheeled, combustion-assisted traveler follow these ancient trails.


The furthest north I've been on 155 is the Chief Joseph longhouse, not quite to Nespelem, about a couple of miles north of where the Ponderosa pines begin these days. Further south still is where the road meets the river, heading upstream to Grand Coulee Dam, behind which Lake Roosevelt stretches forever. 155 clings to the slopes above the river, which hides in fog sometimes and glints in the sun othertimes.

Traveling that way last week, sun and clouds and fog switched off every few minutes. The landscape there has a certain jumpiness on a geologic scale, as well. Glacial erratics, big boulders picked up and dumped during the Pleistocene, dot the hills north of the river, opposite which a broad plain attempts to reach the horizon.

As you leave the Colville Reservation and the Columbia, threading through the towns of Grand Coulee the town and Electric City, you emerge in Grand Coulee the landform, the trench ripped through hundreds of feet of basalt when glacial lakes burst and needed an outlet. Cliffs adorned with multicolored lichens stand well apart, but in many places most of the valley floor is covered with water, Banks Lake, a 'reclamation' project by which rich hunting and gathering grounds were submerged and agriculturalists could draw irrigation water. Hugging the east side talus, knifing through Columbia basalt when need be, Route 155 ensouthens itself.

Though the landscape looks like the dry West, water spills in from the flats above, seeps from the cliffs, and bubbles up from below. Steamboat Rock, which looks like it should be in a southwestern desert, is nearly surrounded by water. Sometimes gulls fly over, laughing in disbelief at their good fortune in the dry interior. Higher up, google mappers and other snoopers ogle the earth's surface. Search 'steamboat rock state park wa' in google maps, and in sat view you see a rainbow sunburst north of the rock, at least until they update the imagery. A proper blogger would link to this view, but I won't. I'm a blatherer, and have no time for such shepherding.

Now technically, 155 stops at the south end of Banks Lake, where the east walls of the canyon fall back and stretch into a plain, miles of settlement basin off to the side of the big floods, but a flood like Missoula cannot be dissipated so easily. the modern roadmap replicates what happened when the straight shot now filled by Banks passed this basin: 155 jags into 2 west for a couple miles, then drops into a long southward arc on what we call 17, but like 155 is just the Grand Coulee passage. After Dry Falls, a chain of lakes descends, but since the Columbia descends elsewhere and this part of the Coulee is un-damned, no river roars. The southernmost water before Grand Coulee spilt itself into a plain capacious enough to tame it is called Soap Lake, where suds scud across the wind-sept surface.

And here the coulee road becomes something else, a series of straight lines traversing squares enclosing irrigation circles. No teasing talus skirts, no chartreuse basalt columns, no flood-ripped canyon walls. Sure, it's better to follow 17 on down toward Moses Lake, more or less on the main flood channel, especially given the piss stench west of the fields west of Ephrata on Route 28. But avoiding urea-stink isn't quite the same thing as racing down the coulee, heading down the 155.