Mary and I are off on another adventure, this one for our 40th anniversary together! Our primary objective is to explore the Channeled Scablands, a spectacular geology feature of Washington State formed when a glacial ice dam broke in Montana and spilled a million billion gallons of water across the landscape of Washington toward the Pacific Ocean. After that, we plan to head on to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle. However, while enroute, we’ve also stumbled upon a few other wonders, like the wind-formed loess hills of the Palouse, gold with wheat ready for harvest!
Mary and I have shared so many adventures over 40 years together, canoeing, hiking, bicycling, camping, raising a family, writing books, gardening, doing research, and of course puzzling over every mysterious geology feature we came across in our travels, whether in Washington, Ireland, France or even in our own home state of Minnesota.
What a romance!
Some people seem to think (in fiction at least) that “romance” is code for sexual activity. How limiting! In my marriage, and also in my fictional stories, “romance” is code for shared adventure! That is why Mary’s and my current adventures together have inspired a breakthrough in my efforts to chart-out book three of my Quelly Clary science fiction adventure series. Falling in love is not enough for a romance. Anyone can fall in love anywhere, anytime. But true love grows from shared adventures with puzzles to solve, dangers to face, and stories of life to share! My heroes, Quelly and Barry (“Barn”) McAdams, will find all of that together as they journey across the forsaken landscape of future Earth, pursued by the alien gods trying to kill them before they can transform human destiny forever!
But, let’s get back to my current romance of 40 years, the ongoing adventure of life shared with my one true love! What are some of our adventures in the Channeled Scablands of Washington and do they stand up the spectacular tales of 40 years together? Of course! We found canyons in the middle of the wheat-covered Palouse hills, a waterfall in a basalt amphitheater, another truly gigantic waterfall with the water long vanished, river potholes of unimaginable size, caves cut in basalt by ancient turbulence, current ripples thirty feet tall, and much more! Check out the pictures below!
Above: Fields of wheat ready for harvest have painted the hills gold just east of the Channeled Scablands.
Above: Mary on our 6-mile hike to Rock Lake in the Cheney-Palouse tract on the Eastern Edge of the Channeled Scablands of Washington. This lake is in a deep channel carved by the raging floodwaters that formed when Glacial Lake Missoula spilled out of Montana, crossed Idaho, and headed across Washington toward the Pacific Ocean.
Above: Palouse Falls, one of the former channels of the great ice age floods that tore across much of Washington, now host to just a tiny little stream!
Above: Mary at Dry Falls, once one of the greatest waterfalls on Earth when the glacial dam in Montana broke and the entire contents of Glacial Lake Missoula spilled westward toward the Pacific Ocean in torrents that towered hundreds of feet above the top of the modern waterfall scarp!
Above: Mary and Russ in a science fiction landscape left by the raging torrent of the ice age floods as they tore across the landscape on the way to the sea.
Above: Russ at a Mega Pothole, carved by “tornadoes” of water (kolks) formed in the channel of the ice age floodwater that ripped the basalt columns out like matchsticks!
Above: Mary in a basalt cave formed as the torrent of water plucked rock from the walls surrounding the Grand Coulee. I (Russ) once told a student who claimed to have seen a non-lava-tube basalt cave, that “no, I don’t know how a cave would form in basalt without it being a lava tube.” What I didn’t know!–it only takes a few unimaginably giant ice age megafloods!
Above: Giant Mega Ripples, formed when vast mountains of floodwater poured over them on its way to the Pacific Ocean (pictures is a bit fuzzy due to distance, but with temperatures in the shade reaching 100 degrees, we decided not to get closer!)
Learn more at Ice Age Floods’ Geologist|Bruce Bjornstad!