Thursday's postcard, and the scenic route to Pasco

June 27, 2024

Jun 27, 2024

Civic mural at Kahlotus, pop. 122, in the heart of Washtucna Coulee in northern Franklin County

Back in Bretzland

First, thanks for your patience with my short hiatus while my son, Devin, was back in town for a few days. I’ve been writing every day but some pieces take on lives of their own (in good ways) and they’re not ready until they’re ready. That’s just the way it is…

In the meantime, Monday was the day we circled to explore the scablands, or Bretzland, as I like to think of it, in honor of the great geologist J Harlen Bretz. It was Bretz’s journeys from a base in Spokane a century ago that resulted in his historic journal article (1923) asserting that the “channeled scablands of the Columbia Plateau” were the work of catastrophic flooding. As I noted in Beautiful Wounds, this was a very unwelcome assertion, at least to Bretz’s peers in the halls of American geology. Bretz was ultimately vindicated and celebrated, receiving the prestigious Penrose Medal, the highest award in American geology, in 1979.

Bretzland has changed barely at all since he mapped it out and it is meaningful to Bretz admirers (like me) to see the landscape as he saw it and described it so well. Among several other observations, Bretz noticed that “like roads to Rome, all scabland rivers led to the Pasco basin” west of Wallula Gap. He took note of the many “erratics”—huge boulders of granitic or metamorphic rock stranded on hillsides far from any known outcrops of similar bedrock. And he described what I think of as the Bretz hills, unusually streamlined and similarly-aligned hills— the result of the great floods sweeping through the Palouse loessial hills, sweeping away whole tracts, but also reshaping the surviving hills such that their steepened faces look north toward Spokane, and their long tails point southward toward Pasco. At least to my eyes, the most elegant Bretz Hills are in this general area, south of I-90 and north of the Snake River.

Prows of Bretz Hills in the remote southeastern corner of Adams County, with the steep faces pointing toward Spokane, in the direction of the floodwaters.

It’s also just a kick in the pants to spend time with Devin. He’s funny, alert, and actively intuitive in situations where time is of an essence. His reactions are usually spot on and he somehow makes even the hardest situations seem bearable; even enjoyable.

My favorite route into the Cheney-Spokane tract of the scablands involves passing through the large parking lot outside the venerable Viking restaurant (a living time capsule of Americana, circa 1958) in the town of Sprague, on state highway 23, just east of the namesake lake. It was warmer than we expected so we shared what turned out to be the last milkshake sold by the Viking on Monday, because after ours was fashioned, they were out of ice cream. It happens.

Western Meadowlark

Of course we took a camera with an ample lens and shared it. We were looking for Western Meadowlarks because, while there’s quite a bit of scabland within minutes of Spokane, you have to go miles beyond the city’s environs to find these beautiful birds and enjoy their piercing songs—loud enough at times to induce a physical startle. Dev got the best Meadowlark photos but there were lots to share.

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