Palouse Falls
Sep. 4th, 2023 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerNorth Cascades Travelog #3
Washtucna, WA - Sat, 2 Sep 2023, 1pm.
We got off to a somewhat lazy start this morning from our hotel room at the Spokane airport. We weren't rolling until almost 10, which meant we didn't get to our first real stop of the trip, Palouse Falls, until nearly noon.
Palouse Falls, named Washington's official state waterfall after a letter-writing campaign by local grade schoolers, is a plunge about 200' high. The official designation is a bit weird considering the falls is in... the middle of freakin' nowhere. I've marked the dateline this blog entry as "Washtucna, WA". If you've never heard of Washtucna, don't feel bad. It's a village of about 200. Our drive from Spokane airport was 103 miles.
Palouse Falls and Palouse Creek cut a steep canyon through basalt cliffs. One interesting thing here, geologically, is that this canyon is fairly young. During the last ice age, this part of Washington was tableland covered by glaciers. When the glaciers started to melt their water flowed along a different course down to the Snake River, which feeds into the Columbia. But the volume of water from the melt was so enormous that it pushed through a different route, finding a fissure in the volcanic rock, and quickly widened out that fissure into the enormous canyon we see today. So this entire canyon might only be 12,000 years old.
The state has closed off the trails down into the canyon, and stationed rangers in the park to monitor them, because apparently a few dumbasses got too close to the edge of the cliffs and fell to their deaths. Look, I agree that places that are truly dangerous should be made off limits, but nature is inherently dangerous. In mountainous parks there are any number of places where if a person takes one wrong step too far over an edge, it's a deadly plunge. I hate that the rest of us are confined to bunny trails just because of a few stupid people. This is why we can't have nice things. 😡
Washtucna, WA - Sat, 2 Sep 2023, 1pm.
We got off to a somewhat lazy start this morning from our hotel room at the Spokane airport. We weren't rolling until almost 10, which meant we didn't get to our first real stop of the trip, Palouse Falls, until nearly noon.
Palouse Falls, named Washington's official state waterfall after a letter-writing campaign by local grade schoolers, is a plunge about 200' high. The official designation is a bit weird considering the falls is in... the middle of freakin' nowhere. I've marked the dateline this blog entry as "Washtucna, WA". If you've never heard of Washtucna, don't feel bad. It's a village of about 200. Our drive from Spokane airport was 103 miles.
Palouse Falls and Palouse Creek cut a steep canyon through basalt cliffs. One interesting thing here, geologically, is that this canyon is fairly young. During the last ice age, this part of Washington was tableland covered by glaciers. When the glaciers started to melt their water flowed along a different course down to the Snake River, which feeds into the Columbia. But the volume of water from the melt was so enormous that it pushed through a different route, finding a fissure in the volcanic rock, and quickly widened out that fissure into the enormous canyon we see today. So this entire canyon might only be 12,000 years old.
Thwarted Twice
Our return visit to Palouse Falls today was a revenge trip. We visited these falls 2 years ago, at a time when the air was thick with smoke from wildfires. The weather that day wasn't great, either. It was extremely hot (100+) and sprinkled rain. Because of all that we limited our hiking to walking around the top of the cliffs and skipped taking the more adventurous scramble down into the canyon. We'd come back another time and do the canyon descent, we agreed. Except now it's closed.The state has closed off the trails down into the canyon, and stationed rangers in the park to monitor them, because apparently a few dumbasses got too close to the edge of the cliffs and fell to their deaths. Look, I agree that places that are truly dangerous should be made off limits, but nature is inherently dangerous. In mountainous parks there are any number of places where if a person takes one wrong step too far over an edge, it's a deadly plunge. I hate that the rest of us are confined to bunny trails just because of a few stupid people. This is why we can't have nice things. 😡
