On To Seattle

We made it to Seattle! Here are Joy and my mom, Hilda, as we sit down to a festive dinner. You know we don't get shrimp cocktails in the trailer!

For the next week our adventures will be in Seattle, but there was one amazing (I need a new word) thing on our way out of Grand Coulee. We learned about the geology that shaped the western United States. During the last ice age glaciers blocked the flow of the very large Clark fork river that drains the Montana area. The blocked river built up a lake as big as an inland sea---thousands of feet deep. When it got big enough to push through the glacier barrier, it apparently broke the glacial dam and drained in a day creating a gigantic rushing river to the Pacific. They think it moved at 60 mph, scouring out the lava rock base of the area hundreds of feet deep in this one rapid flow. They have found large areas down stream where the landscape is rippled 30 ft high and looks like ripples in the sand at the beach. These blockages and floods apparently happened many times during the end of the ice age.

One place we stopped is called Dry Falls. The geologists tells us that the water here created a temporary falls as high as Niagara and several miles wide, eroding the base for miles back from its start.

We drove through spectacular great flood-eroded canyons for at least an hour! Beautiful countryside.
Then we came to a park that held a petrified forrest. Sure enough, the petrified logs looked like real wood, growth rings and all, but were rock!

The park also had petroglyphs---pictures carved on the rocks thousands of years ago by people back then. These at the visitors center had been removed from an area that was going to be flooded by the Grand Coulee Dam.

PS: as I write this, I'm drinking a great cup of Seattle coffee. Thank you Seattle for getting the good coffee movement going!