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thedougsite
Washington
State
A Late Season Circle Ride
2010
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End of the last week of September 2010 a weather window opened that
promised some beautiful late season riding. A riding friend who lives
in the BC Interior and I had promised ourselves that if a window
opened, we would saddle up and go for a nice ride. So on very
short notice we jumped on our bikes and hooked up in Osoyoos where we
turned south and crossed into Washington State. Highway 97 follows the
Okanogan River and we followed 97 down through the Colville National
Forest to Omak where we turned east. This took us into some wild broken
volcanic country. First pic is the highway winding through a rock cut.
After winding through broken volcanic hills the view opened onto the
mighty Columbia River, westward flowing en route to the sea. The river
does not look big in this picture but believe me, it is. Its just far
below our lookout point.
We rode down to and then through Grand Coulee where we saw the dam, but
it was too big to get a good shot of. The dam is massive and so is the
amount of Columbia River water backed up behind it. Incidentally, the
construction of that dam destroyed what had been the biggest salmon
producing river in the world, from a spawning point of view. The fish
could not get past the dam. Once past Grand Coulee we followed the
river through a valley cut into the volcanic bedrock by one of the
biggest floods in history. The valley sides show the layers of lava as
they built up over geological time, visible in the pic below as lines
on the cliff sides. The historic floods were the result of the last ice
age melting, ice dams would build up and block the runoff creating
lakes that covered parts of southern BC, Idaho and well into Montana.
These lakes would last for several hundred years and then drain in a
cataclysmic flood that tore into the earth. The lakes would re-form
over and over. Ice Age Lake Missoula drained with a flow that was 10
times larger than all the rivers in the world.
This sign is posted at a lookout point
to explain what viewers are looking at.
Here is where the waters released from the ice dam lakes cut deeply
into the basalt bedrock. These cliffs are hundreds of feet high and the
flood water would have been hundreds of feet higher.
We spent the night in Ephrata
Washington and then turned west into the Cascade Mountains. Here we are
climbing over Stevens Pass.
Click on the 'Next' button to go to
page #2 for more pics and story.
