Whistling through the 'Wallouse'

There are so many ways to appreciate the beauty of the wheat harvest. Each is a function of who you are-maybe a member of a farming family, perhaps a local person who respects what goes into the hard work of growing wheat, maybe an artist attempting to capture the beautiful landscape. Or maybe just a visitor stunned by the incredible views of fields and hills of our region at different times of the day. Maybe a bit of all those things.

Although it may never quite get the kind of admiration the fertile soil and rolling hills of wheat get, I also like the basalt underneath it all.

Full disclosure: the miraculously famous fertile soil endlessly flowing beautifully throughout the seasons of the Palouse can, rarely but sometimes, be a bit monotonous. I can be hungry for a vista of rocks. Any rocks. Seeing a bump of basalt outcrop on a wheat field slope can feel a bit thrilling. A wall of basalt in a road cut can make me slow down to observe, whistling happily. A hilltop view of the dramatic canyons and peaks of the Blues near Waitsburg/Dayton from any of the many steep winding roads leaving the valley and splintering upward-Payne Hollow, Coppei Creek, Whiskey Creek, Robinette Mountain-mixing forests, fields, dramatic vertical dikes, shoulders and debris flow, make me grateful to be where I am.

A real downside for an utterly amateur petrologist is that much of the impossibly immense basalt fields beneath us are not easily visible. We only get glimpses from the outcrops, the walls, the uplifted arches, and the photogenic columns. The more one delves into the history of geology, using science and some imagination, the more compelling it can become.

Of course, the subject of basalt can be perceived as reasonably dull if one isn't already predisposed to enjoying rock structures and how they produce the foundation for...well, everything we do on the surface.

Our unique basalt underpinnings connect up to real true-blue marvels, including the Missoula Floods, the paths of local creeks and rivers, our region's wheat and grape productivity, and the thousands of years of the windblown ash and fine particles of soil that create the remarkable deep loess of the Palouse. Or, as Waitsburg photographer Bill Rodgers calls it around here, the Wallouse. He distinguishes the two different regions of the Lower Snake River Basin based on his perspectives as a landscape photographer, amateur geographer, and retired geologist.

My children used to groan with boredom whenever we drove through the Channeled Scablands, and I would repeatedly stop and point out, with dad enthusiasm, landforms caused by the floods. I remain a scabland dork whenever I get to visit the area, though, fascinated by all of it.

Arriving in the northern Palouse in the 1970s, I immediately considered the landscape as a second home, and my love for it has never changed. I was young and worked for wheat farmers, hay producers, and loggers. There is a word "topophilia," expressing one's preference for a particular place because it makes one feel at home. I moved away for many years, but finally returning and driving up in a U-Haul from the south, I came into the Wallouse and burst into tears. I had underestimated my homesickness for this countryside.

If you are hiking the steep canyons of the Grand Ronde, Tucannon (look for the huge glacial erratics-boulders deposited in the Lower Tucannon by ice chunks during the Missoula Floods), John Day, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Rivers you may get to see metamorphic and igneous rocks 145-million years old buried by the unimaginable floods of basaltic lava flows. Time is an impossible concept when considering rocks of any age. Most of the basalt beneath us came from eruptions around 14.5 to 16-million years ago from fissures along the borders of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, generated by the same crazily dangerous mantle plume now called the Yellowstone Caldera steadily moving east with tectonic plate activities.

In my imagination, I try to size the entire mass below us but always fail. Some scientist came up with a figure of 48,800 cubic miles (a cube, 37-miles long along each edge) of solid basalt beneath our corner of North America, a block of rock that we are only offered glimpses in the wheat fields and canyon slopes. If we imagined removing the topsoil we could sense the magnitude easily and see the innumerable intricate faults and broad folds-some generating massive hills, plains, and valleys-that ripple outward from the original ancient fissures and shaped by tectonics but, without the lovely earth, it would quickly be as unbearable as standing on the moon.

One last anecdote may be known by many, Steptoe Butte is the thousand-foot tip of a major mountain, composed of 400-million-year-old quartzite and related to Rocky Mountain uplifting, inundated by lava which solidified into basalt as it cooled. A lot of basalt down there! Kinda cool.

There's so much interesting information about the history of the deposition of the glamorous and unique loess soil, and I encourage you to look it up if you have an interest. Also, for anybody wanting more about local geology, the books by Robert Carson and others on the Blue Mountains are beautiful and entertaining page-turners. Rodgers and other photographers, artists, and writers are wonderfully presented in these books. Customers enjoying coffee and sandwiches at Ten Ton Café in Waitsburg can find the books available for a look; then buy them from the Blue Mountain Land Trust (www.BMLT.org). They are keepers and open your eyes and hearts to our region.