Near a parking and camping area on the east bank of the creek, a trailhead invites you to walk southward, toward the Blue Mountains. The path passes beneath basaltic cliffs and skirts vernal ponds. Within an hour or so, you’ll come to Towell Falls, a braided cascade on Rock Creek not far from where the stream joins the Palouse River.

 Aside from the old ranch buildings near the trailhead, there’s little to connect you to anything other than nature. The nearest cheeseburger is well over the horizons.

What’s easy to see is more than enough to make this a must-visit destination. But two years ago, the U.S. Geological Services quietly added another. It’s a freakish revelation tucked within the pages of a report whose title is nearly as long as this sentence.

It turns out the Escure reach of Rock Creek is home to a volcanic rift that, 15 million years ago, pumped a veritable sea of lava all the way to The Dalles, Oregon, more than 100 miles to the west. The rift itself is not so rare. Indeed, there are literally thousands of so-called feeder dikes throughout eastern Washington and northeastern Oregon that became the source for the hundreds of layers of basalt that cover most of the Inland Northwest.

What’s rare is that on a hillside above Rock Creek, within a short walk from the parking area, are thick deposits of volcanic “spatter.” These are piles of once-molten rock that literally got blasted high into the air as lava from the so-called Roza basalt flow came oozing out the Rock Creek feeder dike below the hillside. It is much lighter than the basalt and often embedded with pumice. You can find it by heading upstream on the east bank of the creek (in the opposite direction of the main trail) for about a half-mile. When you see a small, wooden shelter, start climbing to your right. Though much of spatter is rusty brown, some of the larger deposits are conveniently and distinctly red or blue.

Though it’s not mandatory, it’s probably worth a few moments just to exercise your imagination, to try to picture the skyward-shooting curtains of glowing lava (just like the ethereal scenes from the vents on Hawaii’s Big Island last year) that delivered the spatter.

Getting to Escure Ranch

From Spokane, take I-90 west to the town of Sprague, exit 245. Turn left at the stop sign onto Highway 23, traveling south for 12.2 miles to Davis Rd. Turn right onto Davis Rd. At 4 miles there is a “Y,” stay to the right continuing south for 3 miles to Jordan Knott Rd. Turn left onto Jordan Knott Rd. and travel for 2.1 miles to the Rock Creek BLM public land access. Follow the BLM access road until it ends, about 2 miles. A parking area is available near Rock Creek. // (Timothy Connor)

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Under those circumstances, the detour onto the primitive road leading to a hanging gorge east of Banks Lake was a near-perfect choice. Within a few minutes I was walking into a majestic rip in the earth.

We’d probably all know more about this spectacular ravine if it weren’t so close (3 miles) to another epic eastern Washington landmark, Steamboat Rock. Steamboat is a massive anvil that rises 800 feet above the surface of the water in upper Grand Coulee. You can’t miss it.

You can very easily miss Northrup Canyon because its mouth is hidden from the highway (State route 155, linking Coulee City to Grand Coulee dam) by a formidable bulwark of bedrock and ancient flood deposits.

If you’d started your day driving from Pasco or Portland, the only rock outcrops your eyes would have met for hours heading toward Grand Coulee are those of basalt, the bronze lava layers of eastern Washington bedrock that—just beneath our topsoil—cover tens of thousands of square miles. Drill a hole near Pasco and two miles down you can still be drilling into wedding cake layers of basalt like those on display at Steamboat Rock.

When you get near the mouth of Northrup Canyon, however, the road cuts gleam white, and orange, and pink with granite. Because granite, unlike basalt, can only form deep in the crust, it always takes tens of millions of years of uplift and tedious erosion for the shoulders and spires of a batholith to appear at the surface. Well, almost always. What’s somewhat mind blowing about the granite in the Northrup Canyon area is just how suddenly and recently it was exhumed.

It was essentially a modern event. Scientists believe Northrup Canyon was formed during the very last stages of the most recent ice age floods. This means it is likely the canyon didn’t even exist when the earliest North Americans arrived in the Inland Northwest. If people were here to witness the forces that created the canyon, they almost certainly perished within a few minutes of the witnessing. Though modern hikers are in no danger of drowning (beware of the rattlesnakes, though) it takes only a few minutes once you start walking into the ravine to see dramatic evidence of what, at least in geologic time, is a very recent natural explosion.

When he explored Northrup Canyon nearly a century ago, the famous American geologist J Harlen Bretz knew exactly what had happened. “One can stand on the brink of Northrup Canyon and aver with confidence that it can never be satisfactorily explained except as an extinct Niagara,” he wrote.

What Bretz first termed “the Spokane flood” (there were actually dozens) roared 150 miles west before excavating Grand Coulee and what is now Northrup Canyon. Upon arrival, the torrents blasted through the basalt and began to expose the underlying granite—and not just a few pieces here and there. Near the canyon mouth is a massive gumdrop of exposed granite, nicknamed “Gibralter,” that rises well over a hundred feet from the canyon floor. It’s a jaw-dropping sample of the same granitic bedrock that anchors the footings for Grand Coulee Dam, eight miles to the north. The classic great floods canyons, like Grand Coulee, are U-shaped. Northrup Canyon is actually shaped more like a W, with a gleaming ridge of granite between the basalt outer cliffs.

No river was involved in the creation of the canyon, but there is a small stream, Northrup Creek, that waters aspen and dogwood and sinks beneath its cobbles in late summer. A central trail follows the creek a couple miles east to the abandoned Northrup homestead, then doglegs northeast toward a plunge-pool lake. A climbing trail on the south side of the canyon (off limits in winter months so as not to disturb large numbers of nesting bald eagles) offers panoramic views from the top of the rim rock.

To be sure, the rocks have a great story to tell here. But on any given day, as time drifts forward, so do the pines, the aspen, the nesting raptors and the ever-present ravens whose calls echo against the cliffs. It’s like walking into an unfinished, epic poem.

Feature photo: Tim Connor

Originally published in the May 2018 print edition of Out There Venture “Walking the Flood-Carved Wonder of Northrup Canyon.”

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At first sight it’s hard to trust what you’re seeing. Known as “The Feathers,” this formation of exposed basalt crystals barely withstood a succession of devastating floods. From the air, it looks as though a creature with jaws the size of the Rose Bowl has taken two bites from the coulee’s upper terrace. The Feathers somehow survived as a gently curving causeway between the bite marks. There are places where you can easily walk from one side to the other, stepping through gaps between the massive crystals.

What unfolds beneath The Feathers is a deep, bicameral gouge in the earth. The gaping crevasse in the bedrock was created as rampaging, late-Pleistocene flood waters burst out of what is now called the Quincy Basin, a broad area—well over 1,000 square miles—that encompasses most of Grant County. At its exit, just north of what is now Vantage, Wash., Frenchman Coulee functioned as a giant nozzle, directing the flood waters at a 90 degree angle across the Columbia River, slamming with stunning violence into the base of the Colockum Hills. The result can be seen in the magnificent gorge at Vantage, with steep and sheer basalt walls, and from the high ridge east of the river, and in long views with layered dimensions to the north, west and south.

A bit closer to the ground, so to speak, is Nick Zentner, a geology professor at Central Washington University who has popularized Northwest geology with a series of lectures and video documentaries. The first chapter in his video series is devoted to Frenchman Coulee. Viewers meet him as he’s walking and swinging a small rock hammer, which he also uses as a pointer when he’s not using it to crack open stone. Wading through sagebrush to a ledge not far from The Feathers, Zentner declares this all to be “hallowed ground” in a historic scientific controversy, one ultimately resolved only a half century ago when the cardinals of American geology finally concurred that it was catastrophic glacial floodwaters—and not a slow grinding of commonplace geologic forces—that blasted out such massive spaces in the lower Columbia basin.

Zentner makes a point I will also insert. Frenchman Coulee is within a couple long golf shots from Interstate-90, yet 99.9% or more of the motorists who whiz past the Silica Road off ramp (exit143) are oblivious to what they’re missing. Perhaps because there’s no tourist money to be made in the coulee, there’s no hint of signage to let you know it’s there. Practically speaking, if you have time to stop at the Starbuck’s down the road in Moses Lake (or closer still, the Sage Bistro and coffeehouse off exit 151), you probably have time to exit here, take a right on Silica Road and then take a left on Vantage Road. You can then gasp at this important geologic landmark and gasp again at your first sight of The Feathers.

As Vantage Road winds past The Feathers, it descends more steeply toward the coulee floor, where hiking trails into both chambers are easy to access. With balsamroot and other wildflowers in bloom, spring would be a fine time to pack a lunch and bring a friend.

My most recent visit was on a day when a Pacific storm was lashing at the coast and the Cascades. I was hoping the incoming weather would reach the gorge because The Feathers are difficult to photograph in direct sunlight. Alas, as is almost always the case, the sun was shining brightly. Plan B was to find a path below The Feathers to the coulee floor. There’s a waterfall on the eastern face of the north chamber I’d photographed from above a year ago. I wanted to complete the picture, so to speak, from below.

The trail I followed brought me into a V-shaped ravine that opens up into the massive north chamber of the cataract. From this vantage point, the visual dimensions are staggering. A decent camera can take the picture, capturing the nearby rock faces as well as the distant giant blades of the Wild Horse wind farm, straddling the flanks of Whiskey Dick Mountain on the far side of the river. But only a soul can absorb the deeper dimensions the sight evokes.

I used to work there, across the river, in Kittitas County, when I was young. Back then I wrote the same kind of stories that beat reporters everywhere are expected to write. There were car, truck and boat accidents, suspicious fires, domestic disputes that were often sad but sometimes funny, and a massive ash cloud from Mt. St. Helens that tossed purple lightening bolts into the Yakima River canyon.

I was aware, even then, that I was patrolling an interval between two very different cultures, each with its own landscape and sense of identity. My grandfather, Gil, introduced me to this one, the high desert, his favorite trout streams near Dayton, and the precious, sacred stillness that inhabits places like Frenchman Coulee. He sold insurance, drove a Rambler station wagon and sometimes wore bolo ties. His oldest daughter would become a Wazzu cheerleader, and that’s how she met my father. I graduated from Pullman in 1979; there’s a crimson Wazzu jacket in my trunk.

On the other end of the cultural spectrum is Seattle, with its urban wealth, Pacific rim sophistication, and seemingly boundless opportunities—all surrounded by the verdant beauty of nearby mountains and Puget Sound. I think of Kittitas County as a land bridge between these two worlds, with its eastern boundary reaching the sagelands at Vantage and its western boundary reaching the alpine crest west of Cle Elum, where the traffic then spills into King County.

The cultural tension across this divide is genuine and is embroidered in the state’s politics. Overall, Washington is a deeply blue state. But conservative resentment toward Seattle and its overpopulated liberal suburbs is such that there is a formal (if far-fetched) secessionist effort, led by Spokane-area Republican legislators, that would create the state of “Liberty” between Idaho and the Cascades. When you unpack this, what you find is that “liberty,” for some, is about the freedom to discriminate against brown and gay people, to pollute air and waterways with impunity, and brandish assault rifles. If there is any grudging concession that people in Seattle are adept at technology and the arts, it’s offset with an attitude that wisdom and authenticity can best be measured by zip code. Yet, the dispositive rebuttal to this notion can be reduced to one statistic: of the 20 eastern Washington counties, a majority in 19 voted for Donald J. Trump. The lone exception was Whitman County, home to my alma mater. Go Cougs.

I ‘m unable to walk into the vastness of Frenchman Coulee without thinking about this. Last summer, a working group of scientists formally submitted their recommendation that we acknowledge we’ve entered a new geologic epoch. They propose it be named the “Anthropocene” to recognize the profound effects that humans are now causing and inflicting upon the planet’s environment. Their case for the designation is compelling, and—if we didn’t already know this—it identifies each of us as witting or unwitting participants in the profound damage being done to our environment, and other species, as a result of human consumption and pollution.

The more I think about that, the more affinity I feel for the hordes of young people from Seattle who come here, by the hundreds on weekends, to pitch tents in Echo Basin and climb The Feathers and other walls. For the most part, they share my love for this environment and an underlying appreciation for conservation and access. Our passport to epic places like this almost inevitably boils down to political struggles pitting private interests against the public interest in access and conservation. As with climbing big rock faces, it is not for the faint of heart.

The phalanx of basalt crystals at The Feathers has an arc to it that brings to mind the famous semi-circle at Stonehenge. The “bluestones” at Stonehenge were, of course, painstakingly assembled by ancient people. The Feathers stand as survivors to natural forces much more powerful than a thermonuclear bomb. It is remarkably improbable, this curving conga line of basalt pillars—1-2 crystals deep. Especially in the context of these odds, it is a moving, natural monument. If you and I were to fight for something important, and we were among the last standing for whatever that cause might be, we’d like the memorial to look something like this.

Feature photo: Feathers // Tim Connor

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As for the creek itself, for most of the year there is barely any water at this crossing. This is a noteworthy riddle. The discernible headwaters for Deep Creek are only a few miles away, in a maze of wetlands west of Four Lakes. Although the creek sometimes floods dramatically during a rain on snow event in late winter—or in a spring as relentlessly wet as this one—it’s too small and ephemeral to attract kayaks or canoes. Indeed, hiking along and across the creek bed is the best way to explore the ravine from the trailhead off Seven Mile Road, about a half mile west of the Spokane River. So it is curious as to how such a trickle of water could create such an extraordinary crease in the earth.

The answer is: it didn’t. It’s just a geologic mind trick. The farther you head downstream, to the north and east, the more magnified the natural ruse becomes. You begin to encounter massive basalt outcroppings. As the creek approaches its confluence with the Spokane River, it passes below enormous basalt cliffs, reaching upwards of 400 feet above the floor.

The towering cliffs display contours and shapes seen in many of the more familiar coulees in eastern Washington’s channeled scablands, with rounded thumbs, occasional spires and massive teardrops of basalt. This only makes sense because these distinctive creations were formed by the same torrents of late Pleistocene epoch floodwaters, the largest of which, from ancient Lake Missoula, flowed through the Spokane valley before turning southward, eventually blasting through the Columbia River gorge to the Pacific.

The basalt forms in the impressive rimrock heights above Deep Creek bear a striking resemblance to those exposed at Northrup Canyon, just east of Grand Coulee, where, with less tree cover, you can better imagine what the power of the ancient Lake Missoula flood waters would have looked like. Good luck trying to imagine the sound, it had to have been deafening. At what is now Deep Creek, the flood waters overwhelmed the landscape, exploited a weakness in the underlying, fractured basalt, and simply smashed a pathway out to the west plains and beyond.

Perhaps the best-known instance of the ancient Missoula floodwaters doing the excavation for a present day stream, is the Palouse River canyon, eighty miles south of Deep Creek. Near the small town of Hooper in southwest Whitman County, the Palouse River makes a sharp left turn. It is at this point that the Palouse leaves behind the now dry river course it used to follow, heading west and then south before it reached the Columbia River near Pasco. Today the Palouse makes a shortcut down to the Snake, a shortcut created entirely by the almost unimaginable flood waters that hammered through a divide and then carved the canyon that now bears the name of the river that appropriated it.

After the famed scabland geologist J Harlan Bretz did his early field work on the Palouse River canyon in the 1920s, he discovered something amazing about the Snake River. He not only found enormous sand and gravel bars in the Snake upstream from where the Palouse empties into the Snake, but he noticed by their composition and shape that they could have only been created by water moving east. Again, this is at a place where the Snake River is actually headed west. The extraordinary flow reversal could only be explained by accounting for the enormous inflow of Lake Missoula floodwaters from Palouse and nearby Devils Canyon, literally causing the flow of the Snake to temporarily reverse itself for several miles.

Deep Creek isn’t remotely comparable to the Snake, nor the Palouse. But if there’s an added dash of geophysical humor to Deep Creek, it is that today it weaves and tumbles northward in the same canyon carved by ice age floodwaters that were headed the other way.

I’m surprised at how narrow it is in places, and intrigued with the variety of metamorphic and igneous rocks that litter the ravine and form enormous deposits on its margins. There are also places where the basalt seems to come alive with ornate fractures and fists of suddenly cooled lava that were formed under dynamic conditions, clearly through interactions with water. I’ve even found glossy black shards of obsidian which (thankfully for those of us who climb on the basalt outcroppings) are rare in eastern Washington’s lava fields.

The main part of the canyon is within Riverside State Park, and is well-known to rock climbers. Actually, whether you are a serious climber or not, there is a near irresistible temptation to climb these rocks, especially on the large outcrops of exposed basalt near the creek’s confluence with the Spokane River. You don’t have to be a geologist to marvel at what you’re climbing on. As a photographer, I’ve come to appreciate the Deep Creek ravine as a texture garden in the variety of rocks, plants, water, ice and wood that is stripped, scoured and sun-bleached. In the rocks alone, there are signs of spasms and large erupting gas bubbles, explosions of shape and color that got frozen in time and then uncovered by the catastrophic floodwaters blasting through from Montana.

In such moments of discovery, it’s as though timescales merge. The basalt floes are roughly 15 million years old. The flood waters that ripped the top layers off the basalt were unloosed roughly 15,000 years ago.

Preposterously, I can’t help but bring my time—human time—into the equation, and it’s usually measured in a few very precious hours that I can be away from all the other places I’m expected to be. Just like the rest of the world, there’s no shortage of reminders and enforcers that our clocks reign supreme. What a blessing it is to be in a natural setting that so quietly and profoundly refutes this illusion.

All of this means I can offer the very highest compliment to the Deep Creek ravine—as with other such sanctuaries, it makes me lose track of time altogether.

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