Palouse River & the Snake River
This morning, under clear crisp fall skies, we anchored at the wide, placid, mouth of the Palouse River. When the Corps of Discovery passed by here they named it Drewyer’s River in honor of George Drouillard. In the early 1800’s this confluence of the Palouse and the Snake was the site of the largest village of the Palouse Indians. It was also just above many difficult rapids on the Snake River. This area looks much different today than it did in Lewis and Clark’s time. Today this beautiful area is nearly deserted. The nearby Lyons Ferry and Palouse Falls State Parks are the main signs of habitation. The rapids were long ago flooded out by water backed up by the Lower Monumental Dam.
We stopped here today to view the beautiful scenery as well as look at traces from an earlier time, that of the Bretz Floods. These giant catastrophic floods, fueled by waters from glacial Lake Missoula, raced through the region more than 50 times at the end of the last ice age. Each time these huge flood waters appeared, they carved out more and more of the landscape leaving wide river channels, dry falls and sculpted basalt monuments in their wake. We saw the Palouse Falls from above and also experienced the lower part of the river by Zodiac and kayak.
One of the discoveries from the Zodiacs was a young raccoon curled up on one of the basalt cliff faces. It had found a secure foothold for sleeping, but looked like it could have used a parachute for an easy escape from its rocky foothold.
In the afternoon, to celebrate the upcoming holiday, we had a pumpkin carving contest. The theme, to test our creative abilities, was “Lewis and Clark.” There was an abundance of ingenuity. Represented in the jack o lantern gallery were Floyd’s skull, a “rounded” Sacagawea, Pomp, the salmon they ate, a herd of buffalo, Chief Twisted Hair, and the entire route across the country.
This morning, under clear crisp fall skies, we anchored at the wide, placid, mouth of the Palouse River. When the Corps of Discovery passed by here they named it Drewyer’s River in honor of George Drouillard. In the early 1800’s this confluence of the Palouse and the Snake was the site of the largest village of the Palouse Indians. It was also just above many difficult rapids on the Snake River. This area looks much different today than it did in Lewis and Clark’s time. Today this beautiful area is nearly deserted. The nearby Lyons Ferry and Palouse Falls State Parks are the main signs of habitation. The rapids were long ago flooded out by water backed up by the Lower Monumental Dam.
We stopped here today to view the beautiful scenery as well as look at traces from an earlier time, that of the Bretz Floods. These giant catastrophic floods, fueled by waters from glacial Lake Missoula, raced through the region more than 50 times at the end of the last ice age. Each time these huge flood waters appeared, they carved out more and more of the landscape leaving wide river channels, dry falls and sculpted basalt monuments in their wake. We saw the Palouse Falls from above and also experienced the lower part of the river by Zodiac and kayak.
One of the discoveries from the Zodiacs was a young raccoon curled up on one of the basalt cliff faces. It had found a secure foothold for sleeping, but looked like it could have used a parachute for an easy escape from its rocky foothold.
In the afternoon, to celebrate the upcoming holiday, we had a pumpkin carving contest. The theme, to test our creative abilities, was “Lewis and Clark.” There was an abundance of ingenuity. Represented in the jack o lantern gallery were Floyd’s skull, a “rounded” Sacagawea, Pomp, the salmon they ate, a herd of buffalo, Chief Twisted Hair, and the entire route across the country.
