Return to Expedition 2000 homeDanae
May 11, 2000
We decided to take today off and add a little extra mileage on to the next two days before resupply. So we camped the night at Pothole State Park. Today we went into town to do laundry and have lunch before heading off to Dry Falls. This is the coolest place. I think I might have to see what's around here and take a road trip sometime. I don't know. There were several lava flows in this area - tons and tons of lava. Before these flows the area was abundant with trees and animals now extinct from this area. There were rhinos, sloths, woolly mammoths (during the ice age), giant beavers, lions, saber-toothed tigers, and others. After the lava flows, there was the climatic cooling that lead to the ice age. The glaciers moved into Washington and Idaho and formed dams over a river. This river became so large that the sheer weight collapsed the ice dams and flooded all the way out to the sea with so much intensity that it left huge thirty story ripple marks on the land, picked up boulders weighing up to 200 tons and deposited them miles away and ripped apart the basalt layers creating a waterfall two and a half times as high and five times longer than Niagara Falls. The flood was so tremendous that it shook the ground and could be heard coming half an hour before it hit. It wiped the area clean of all nutrient rich soil and wildlife, leaving what we now call the scablands.
Chris had already spent time here and he knows a lot about this place. He had a week to explore it so he knew this really cool hike. We hiked up to the top of one of the falls and it was so amazing up there. From the top you could see huge craters formed from the water making huge whirlpools. There were so many flowers up there - there were even irises and there was a pond up there too. We wandered around till Chris found the one exit. But he had forgotten that it was kinda sketchy because there was a 10 or 15 foot cliff at the top that a human could down pretty easy. We spent a good half hour trying to get Brandy to go down it. She was so, so scared. So, Chris turned around and went back with her. By now the weather had turned bad and it was time to go back to camp - or else Chris would have shown us a good cliff diving spot. I was kinda disappointed but there will be other times. It was amazing.
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