WatershedEvents

WAITING FOR THE CHUM....

 

 

I'm always amazed by how rapidly time seems to fly these days. I haven't been on this site for months...been keeping my whining mostly to myself. I'm still writing about Bretz, and just recently made what I hope will be the breakthrough that will let me get this publication monkey off myback. More about all that as it develops - in the meantime, if you are interested, check out this LINK. It will take you to a podcast by Nick Zentner of Nick on the Rocks.

One of the issues I deal with continually is the surprising fact that I simply don't have time to get to everything I've loaded onto my plate. What makes this so surprising is I am fully retired, and am the master of at least 95% of my time. There are so many possibilities, some of which are purely pleasurable, but others more focused on "paying it forward."

The work on the Bretz material falls somewhat into both categories, although the pleasurable component has been somewhat strained for the last few months. Many very busy people gave me so much of their valuable time during the early stages of research, and I feel so indebted to them that I absolutely must deliver a final result. I also feel  miserable about the poor progress I've been making since I finished my first rough draft. 

Another activity, one which is more "community contribution" focused involves a nearby salmon stream. Beatty Creek it's called, and I'm going to try to put together a Friends-of group to work for its welfare. It is so small and so relatively remote that it isn't even on most maps of the area. It is also intermittent - a status which generally puts it more at risk than its cousins, the so-called perrenials. But every late November-early December it litterally teems with chum salmon, many of them over three feet in length. Up until now, I've tried to leave the advocacy work behind me - I had pretty much shot my bolt with the publication of Up Fanno Creek...or so I thought. 

At any rate, the rains have begun, and the chum will not be long behind. They are already in the lower reaches of Mclane Creek, the major stream into which Beatty Creek flows. It is only a matter of a few more inches of rainfall before they will be able to ascend the 200 verticle feet they must travel before they appear in our neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we wait...

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

THE BRETZ SAGA

 

REVISITED

 

 

 

 

(WORKING TITLE)

 

 

 

 

I began work on this book in April of 2016, and am not all that far from completion of a rough draft. Right now it looks as if I'll get over that major hurdle by at least the beginning of summer. That puts me about four months behind the (very) ambitious schedule I set for myself last fall. There are multiple reasons for the delay, not the least being a lack of discipline with the research. If you've ever been bitten by the research bug, you know already how much fun it can be, especially if you let the flow of data pull you off onto areas that don't really relate directly to your topic.

These last few days I've been working on a brief period of Bretz's life - the summer of 1906 - which stands at about 700 words for the moment. (That's around two book-pages, which is likely to condense to less than a page in the finished book.) I should have banged this section out in a day or so, but I allowed myself to drift off course and ended up in Bulgaria.

Bulgaria? What the hell has Bulgaria to do with a farm boy from Michigan who became famous for recognizing that eastern Washington had once been the site of Mega Floods? Pretty much nothing. But once I'd tucked my head into the material, I had the devil of a time pulling it out.

Here, briefly, is how I got stuck in that fascinating country, during a fascinating portion of its very long and turbulent history:

 

• J Harlen Bretz married Fanny Challis, his college sweetheart, on June 1st, 1906.
• She was the daughter of the Reverend Dewitt Challis, who was a Methodist Episcopal missionary in Bulgaria between 1875 and 1891.
• Fanny was born in 1881, which means she spent the first ten years of her life on foreign soil.
  
• Being an American-protestant-missionary in Bulgaria in those days was no picnic....because? 
  
• Etc.

 

The rabbit-hole turned out to be full of twists and turns, and several centuries deep - millenia even. Ultimately, I was sucked in by an encounter with the word "Thrace." It found and fired off a dim and distant memory from my high school course in Ancient and Medieval History. I loved that subject!

Anyway, I am back in the USA and about to wrap up the Flint episode of Bretz's life, at least for the time beginning. That's presuming I can keep from exploring the deeper roots of Chautauqua - don't ask me how that figures in...

Ball and Socket

A few days ago, on a field trip to Frenchman Coulee, I was with a group of Ice Age Floods enthusiasts when we ran across a curious geological phenomenon – groups of bowl-shaped polygons, some as wide as six feet across and almost a foot deep. Here’s a little of the information I’ve been able to dig up on these formations; more to follow if/when I get a chance to return to the subject.

The earliest mention of the phenomenon I’ve found so far was by R. Mallet, an Englishman, in 1874. I haven’t yet found an online copy of the paper (Volcanic Energy: An attempt to develop its True Origin and Cosmical Relations), but whatever his theory might have been, it (and he) were severely bashed by one of Lyell’s buddies, George Poulett Scrope – Note on Mr. R. Mallet’s “Prismatic Structures of Basalt,” Monthly Journal of Geology V.12, Jan-Dec, 1875.

Re: https://books.google.com/books?id=MlpmAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA413&lpg=PA413&dq=%22cup-shaped%22+basalt+formations&source=bl&ots=QRxyZxYZ-u&sig=k6Hxf-mqjtuGiO1pToWZzNUsEug&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii9L_Kwc_TAhWJKGMKHYJnAhAQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22cup-shaped%22%20basalt%20formations&f=false
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The next reference to pop up was to a paper by R. B. Sosman titled Types of prismatic structures in igneous rocks, Journal of Geology Vol. 24, No. 3, (April-May 1916). On page 229 of this paper, Sosman discusses cross-columnar fracturing, which sometimes produces a ball and socket situation in which the bottom of the upper portion of the column is convex, the lower portion concave. Paragraph 6.2 is of particular significance in this regard. (This fits in with the notion that the formations above were created when the Missoula Floods ripped off the upper portions of the columnar basalts that make up so much of the Frenchman Coulee area. See photo of Echo Basin below.)

Re: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30079357.pdf
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A 2004 GSA article by C. Schafer & S. Kattenhorn (Character and evolution of fractures in low-volume Pahoehoe lava flows in eastern Snake River Plain, Idaho) provides information on how flow characteristic and differences in cooling rates (external vs internal / top-down to bottom-up)impact the development of cross columnar fractures. According to this paper, the concave/convex relationship (ball and socket relationship) tends to be favored in flow materials produced by the CRBG*. Another aspect of this fracturing noted by the authors is that it takes place in areas immediately outside the viscus materials, rather than inside them.

Re: http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/116/3-4/322.full.pdf+html
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I have to leave this post unfinished for the time being. Yard chores are calling me. But one more note, a personal observation: while studying my photos of these curiosities, it occurred to me that the slope angles involved here remind me a great deal of the kind of cleavages you get when you break certain types of basalt – one side is invariably concave, the other convex. I think that might be a significant observation, but am not geologically versed enough to know for sure. More on all this later;  meanwhile, comments, observations, and additional references would all be greatly appreciated.
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*The earliest mention of this ball-in-socket phenomenon I’ve found was in the 1875 reference mentioned above. That discussion focused on the basalts in the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Does this mean the Grand Ronde Flood Basalt Group in Washington/Oregon/Idaho is somehow related to those from which the Giant’s Causeway’s spectacular columnar basalts originated?

 

Note: Echo Basin. If you double click on this photo, it should open to a larger size. Then look for the rock climbers in the upper right quadrant. Before the floods tore through this area, an entire assemblage of colonnades extended above the high ground shown here.

Drumheller Channels

Daughter Erica surveys the Drumheller Channels from a ledge overlooking Black Lake.

The view is to the northeast; but if you did a 360 here, it would look pretty much the same in any direction. The bones of this vast plain came into being sometime between 16.5 and 13.5 million years ago, when the flood basalts of the Columbia River Basalt Province pooled here, then begin to solidify. How long it took the completely sterile surface to completely heal in this particular area is hard to say, but it may have been thousands of years. Then as now, the prevailing winds were from the southwest. With every passage of the wind, a thin layer of loess was put down over the mineral-rich, rapidly decaying basalt. The layers ultimately accumulated to great depths - in some areas the soil was well over 200 feet deep. The closest land-borne colonizers were at least 90 miles away from here; the wind-borne plants and critters would have had to travel even further. 

The CRBG wasn't the only cataclysm to pass over this land in geologically recent times. Flood waters from glacial Lake Missoula poured through here around 13,500 years ago. The floodwaters were 10 to 12 miles wide, 200-400 feet deep, and moving at around 65 miles an hour. What you see in this location today are the ripped up remains of the CRBG basalts themselves. The vast and fertile prairie that once covered those basalts was completely stripped away and carried south towards the Columbia River. Once the flood had torn off the 200-400 feet of loose material covering the basalt, it went after the bedrock itself, literally plucking up great chunks and bearing them away as well.

J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who first recognized that the Scablands resulted from a flood of nearly unimaginable proportions, had this to say about this particular place:

“Drumheller is the most spectacular tract of butte-and basin scabland on the plateau. It is an almost unbelievable labyrinth of anastamosing [braided] channels, rock basins, and small abandoned cataracts”. 

The viewpoint above is on the southwest corner of the channeled area. I'd like to think Bretz once stood on these very rocks, and maybe someday I'll be able to find out if that is true.

I  was curious about the Drumheller name for this area, having already heard about the town of Drumheller in Alberta, Canada. After a little research (nothing exhaustive) I put my money on Daniel Drumheller, who settled in these parts around 1880. Looking for confirmation, I contacted the US Fish and Wildlife Service to see what they could tell me:

 No idea.  Washington State Place Names offers nothing.

We're going to keep looking.  I've reached out to the National Park Service, who administers the NNL program, and Laurie is going to look in the files.  If she finds anything, she'll let you know.  However, it just might be one of those things that can never be tracked down -- the person generating the application puts in a name, for reasons known only to that person, and that reason goes to the dustbin of obscure history with the person.  Or the place was named decades earlier by a local who, once again, is the only person who knows why he/she started calling the place by that name.

Dan (USFWS)

I'm focusing my research efforts in so many directions right now, I can't afford to pursue this curiosity any further, at least for the time being. But something tells me I will be passing through both this country and this little place-name mystery again, before I conclude my work on Bretz's wonderful story.