blackfoot-valley

carried debris, pummeled and scoured much of eastern Washington down to the bedrock while plucking out huge chunks of rock, creating the channeled scablands that now dominate much of the land to the west, southwest, and south of Spokane in an area some 120 miles long and 100 miles wide. That area now displays broad trenches regionally called coulees, created by rush- ing waters and its debris violently cutting into the basalt deposited in an earlier volcanic era. Even beyond the scablands themselves, the Yakima Valley, and the sites of Pasco, Walla Walla, and Kennewick were all inundated under hundreds of feet of water. The flood pummeled through the Columbia River Gorge and con- tinued clear to the Pacific, some six hundred miles away from the shattered ice dam. Bedrock plucked from the side of Mt. Jumbo in Missoula has been found in the constricted Columbia River Gorge at 1,000 feet above today’s river level. House-sized boulders from lower Lake Missoula were deposited as far afield as Eugene, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, floated there in the grip of large piec- es of broken ice. Estimates put the peak discharge of this cataclysmic outflood as equal to ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world today, and sixty times that of the world’s greatest river, the Amazon. One can only imagine the feelings of doomed people in its path - and many archeologists and anthropologists now believe there were people living here at the time, not necessarily ancestors of present native peoples - as an unimaginable rush of water bore down on them to snuff out their lives along with those of mammoths and the other animals they hunted. The only warning would have been a pulsing roar, followed by terrifying blasts of wind produced by the approaching 150 foot high wave front. 21