2025 E. Washington Road Trip 03 - Palouse Falls and Washtucna

Palouse Falls State Park Heritage Site

Palouse Falls is a geologic wonder in east central Washington. The rock here is part of the Columbia River Basalt Group, which covers over 81,000 square miles of the earth's surface in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, western Idaho, and part of northern Nevada. Most of the basalt erupted between 14 and 17 million years ago, or the middle-late Miocene epoch. We do not need to delve deeper into the volcanic history of the region, but consider that you see these remarkable basalt outcrops in many parts of the state east of the Cascades. 

The spectacular canyon and the waterfall at the state park are a result of immense floods that burst from Glacial Lake Missoula. Near the end of the last continental glacial era, about 15,000 years ago, a lobe of ice blocked the drainage of what is now the Clark Fork River. The water that backed up created Glacial Lake Missoula, a major body of water that may have included as much volume as the combined present Lakes Erie and Ontario. As the water level rose, pressure against the ice dam increased and caused the ice to float. The dam failed and a mass of water rushed westwards (see the figure below). Peak flow may have been as high as 386 million cubic feet per second (cfs). As a comparison, the flow of the Mississippi River at Old River Control during the record 2011 flood was 2 million cfs.

Floodwaters rushed across east central Washington towards the Columbia River valley and on to the Pacific. The waters carved an immense network of channels, canyons, and valleys, creating what we now call the Channeled Scablands. These included Grand Coulee, where the dam is now located, Dry Falls, and Palouse Falls. Flood waters even reached south deep into the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where they deposited masses of sediment. Geologists now estimated that there were at least 40 of these pulses of water that occurred over a period of about 2,500 years.

Consider the time scale. The earth is about 4.5 to 5 billion years old. The Missoula Floods occurred about 15,000 years ago, only a is a tiny fraction of earth's history. Humans may have come to North America during the last glacial maximum between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago (based on footprints found at White sands National Park). Therefore, predecessors of our present native Americans saw these floods. 

The Washington Department of Natural Resources has an excellent interactive presentation of Washington's Ice Age floods. 

Areas affected by floods (teal color), from the Montana Natural History Center, Glacial Lake Missoula Chapter. Note the ice lobe that extended south into the Puget Lowlands.

Palouse Falls from the visitor's center (Samsung phone digital file)

These amazing columns of basalt show lava flows of different ages. When the basalt cools quickly, it forms hexagonal columnar formations. Devil's Tower in Wyoming (where the UFOs land) and the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland are other well-known examples. A Wikipedia article lists other examples around the world.

View southwest (downstream) of the Palouse River. The terraces outline successive basalt flows. (50mm ƒ/2 Rikenon lens)

Do visit Palouse Falls State Park Heritage Site. It is an impressive example of geology and the amazing effects of flowing water. 

Washtucna

Washtucna is a small town in Adams County about 17 miles north of Palouse Falls and about a hour from Spokane, Walla-Walla, and Pullman. The town is at the head of the Washtucna Coulee (again, one of the remnants of the Missoula Floods) and is therefore lower than some of the surrounding terrain. 

The town looked like it had gone through a rough time economically. I saw some interesting subject material along Main Street (Route 261).

El Camino (28mm ƒ/2.8 Vivitar lens)

I took most of these photographs on Kodak Portra 160 film using a Pentax MG camera and Pentax, Vivitar, and Rikenon lenses.  Northeast Photographic in Bath, Maine developed the oilm. 

References

Waltham, T., 2010. Lake Missoula and the Scablands, Washington, USA. Geology Today, pp 152-159DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2451.2010.00763.x

2025 E. Washington Road Trip 02 - Murdock, Wishram Heights, and Kahlotus, Washington

Heading east through Eastern Washington on our May 2025 road trip, we passed through some picturesque small towns. Here are some examples.

Murdock

Murdock is a hamlet on the north (right) bank of the Columbia River just north of Dallesport. We drove through en route to the bridge that crosses to the Oregon side of the river. Murdock looked a bit tired, with some good motor transport parked on the grass and in driveways. 

Wishram Heights

Continuing east on the Lewis and Clark Highway (Washington State Route 14) and you reach Wishram Heights. The main part of town is down the hill next to the Columbia River, but the Heights is along Route 14. The impressive Oregon Trunk Rail Bridge crosses the Columbia about a mile downstream (west) of Wishram. 

The Heights was not too inspiring. The dead cars and rather beat-up cottages/houses were interesting.    

The Road North, Pasco-Kahlotus Highway

This is lonely open terrain, with an occasional barn and crossroad. In May, the temperature was comfortable, but it gets hot here in summer.

Kodak T400CN film, Leica IIIC camera, 50mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 lens, yellow filter

Kahlotus

Kahlotus is in Franklin County at the northern end of the Pasco-Kahlotus Highway. The population is 147? The town is in the Palouse terrain, with its gently rolling hills. 

Eastern Washington offers a wealth of interesting topics to photograph and explore. To be continued...

I took the color photographs with Kodak Portra 160 film using a Pentax MG camera and various Pentax K-mount lenses. These are still inexpensive and totally capable. Eventually, the inventory of these cheap 1980s and 1990s lenses will run out. Please click any photo to expand it and see details.

The black and white photograph of the highway is on Kodak T400CN film with my 1962 Soviet Jupiter-8 lens. 

2025 E. Washington Road Trip 01 - The Dalles, Oregon

Road Trip! A chance to explore, see new places, learn about new geography. 

Ready to roll in a rented minivan (it is not quite tall enough for bikes)

We headed east in May of 2025 with a rented minivan, bicycles, and cameras. For our first stop, we crossed the Columbia River at Dallesport and stayed in The Dalles.

The Dalles is a city on the on the left (south) bank of the Columbia River in Oregon. The city has a dramatic setting as the gateway to the Columbia Gorge. The site was a historic trading center for native Americans as well as European travelers on the Oregon trail. It is still a major rail junction and center for agricultural products. 

BNSF rail yard (135mm ƒ/3.5 Pentax-M lens)

The city has a historic downtown with early 20th century commercial buildings. We walked around town and looked for the typical topics that interest me.  

Alley facing Wasco County second courthouse

Wall art, 1st Street

Warehouse, Jefferson Street (50mm ƒ/2 Rikenon lens)

Sunshine Mill, view east from 1st Street

Where are the cars? Jefferson Street (50mm ƒ/2 Rikenon lens)

Time for a breakfast coffee and croissant, 2nd Street (50mm ƒ/2 Rikenon lens)

Where is the horse? View east from Jefferson Street

This ends our all too short stopover in The Dalles. Nice town, and I want to return. 

I tool these pictures on Kodak Portra 160 film with a Pentax MG camera and several lenses. The 50mm scenes are from my $25 Ricoh 50mm ƒ/2 Rikenon lens. This is a compact mostly plastic lens that was sold with many K-mount Ricoh SLR cameras in the 1980s. It is a light weight 6-element double Gauss design, and the optical quality is excellent. No complaints! Please click any photo above to see more details.

Tourist Notes

Restaurant: The Dalles Thai Cuisine is excellent! We were surprised considering what rotten food we have had in many Thai restaurants in the USA. We had the roasted duck.

A comfortable place to stay downtown on W. 2nd Street: The Dalles Inn

From the Archives: The 1938 Great New England Hurricane and Marblehead Neck

Hurricanes

The Great New England Hurricane of September 1938 was one of the most destructive storms to hit Long Island and New England in the 20th century. It caused massive damage to coastal communities and inland forests of a degree that no residents had ever experienced in their lifetimes. Throughout New York and New England, the wind and water dropped 275 million trees, seriously damaged more than 200,000 buildings, knocked trains off their tracks, and beached thousands of boats. Wind and rain damage extended as far north as Rutland, Vermont. Entire city blocks burned in New London and other industrial towns, and downtown Providence, Hartford, and other cities were flooded. 

New England had suffered from hurricanes before 1938, and several times since then. Even Governor Bradford of the Boston Bay Colony wrote about such a storm in 1635 in his diary. I wrote about the 1938 hurricane in a 2022 blog entry, and you can read my longer article in the Journal of Coastal Research, available via BioOne Digital.

My father worked at Providence District of the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1938. But before the storm, he was assigned to stream gaging and inspection along the Connecticut river and missed downtown Providence being inundated by the storm surge. I found only a few negatives in his archives showing some damage to a shore road in Winthrop, Massachusetts. And, surprisingly, I only found one Providence negative. Are there more in his boxes of negatives?

Providence, Rhode Island

This photograph shows Fox Point in Providence, Rhode Island. I thought I recognized the distant gas storage tank on the right. This, or newer tanks, can be seen near I-95 south of downtown Providence. But I could not find the railroad tracks on contemporary maps. 

It took some diligent detective work by a friend to positively identify the location. He looked at Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America by Thomas J. Campanella (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Photographers of the Fairchild Aerial Survey company took these superb aerial photographs over a period of five decades. You can buy a copy on Amazon. The 25 August 1929 photograph of Providence told the story. The annotation shows the features that you see in my dad's view with the sailing vessel. Click the picture to see the details.

I was confused by contemporary Google maps because I could not find any evidence of the railroad tracks that you see in my dad's photograph. The tracks are now gone, and the right-of-way is buried under I-195, which runs east-west across the southern edge of Fox Point. But where did these former waterfront tracks go? Where was cargo shipped? A Google map created by author Kayakhomeless shows the historic heavy rail lines superimposed on a contemporary map. 

The black lines show heavy rail (not trolley rail). From the east, the tracks crossed the Seekonk River and ran east-west along the shore of Fox Point and then turned north to follow the east shore of the river. All this track is now gone. On the east side of the Seekonk River, the track diverged. 1. Heading south along the east side of the Providence River, thie rail line has been converted into the superb East Bay Bike Path.  2. Heading north, the track crossed the river again on a bascule bridge, and entered the East Side Railroad Tunnel. The tunnel is no longer in use, but it still runs under the city below Brown University. 

One can chase many fascinating leads trying to identify features on old photographs.

Winthrop, Massachusetts

The surge and waves from the 1938 hurricane undermined the seawall and road foundation in Winthrop. Note how in that era, children and curious onlookers were free to climb on the rubble. 

Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts

Marblehead Neck is a rocky peninsula that projects into Massachusetts Bay. The geology consists of Late Proterozoic igneous and volcanic rocks belonging to the Avalon terrane. The rock has been modified by faulting and erosion, with glacial activity leaving the granite marred and exposed.

The Neck was considered an elegant place to have a summer "cottage" early in the 20th century. Today, it is lined with mansions, some of which are ostentatious and grotesque. The perils of wealth.

My dad took this picture from Castle Rock Park looking north. I have been unable to find any information about this unusual moderne beach home. Its spectacular setting on the rocks now hosts a more ordinary New England home. 

The mansion with the tower was called Questenmere. Mr. Fred McQuesten, a timber magnate, built the house in 1906. He died in the house in 1923. The house survived into the 1930s and had been renamed Tioga Towers, but I can't find any more information. 

This ends our short 1938 tour of the New England shore. Possibly there are more negative from this era showing Providence or the New England coast. 

These negative were from a film pack with 2¼ × 3¼"sheets. A film pack was a metal box containing 12 or 16 thin sheets. Each was attached to a paper pull tab. The photographer pulled the tab after he took a photograph, and the negative slid around the inside of the box to the back. I explained how this worked when I used 4 × 5" Versapan pack films. I wrote about them in 35mmc and on this blog. I scanned the negatives with an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo flat bed scanner using the Epson software. 

Film Processing Envelopes from the 1930s

Film processing was an enormous business for most of the 20th century. Thousands of companies around the country and around the world handled sales of film and supplies, processing, printing, and reprinting for professionals and amateurs. For many companies in the USA, the customer walked up to a counter and gave a clerk his/her rolls of film. After a day or two, the customer returned and picked up an envelope or folder containing the prints and negatives. Here are some of the envelopes that I found among my father's boxes of negatives. He became an enthusiastic photographer around 1928, when he was in college in the Boston area. 

Boston Area

1929

1929 or 1930

1939

1939

Approx. 1944

Huntington, West Virginia

No phone number printed on the envelope? From 1930, when my dad first moved to Huntington. He had not traveled far beyond Boston and Rhode Island, so West Virginia must have been an adventure.

Note how Premier Studio prominently wrote "Kodaks" on their envelope in an attempt to confuse customers. Premier may have used Kodak paper or chemicals, but the term on the envelope was deceptive. Premier was more modern than Hoback's and listed a 4-digit telephone number, 9197.

St. Louis, Missouri

1935 but a 1931 price list

This information sheet appears to be from a legitimate Eastman Kodak store. Notice that they developed film packs. These were popular mid-century because a user could take 16 pictures in quick succession. My dad's Certo-Sport used film packs. I tried it once around 1970, so at least then, the 16-exposure packs were still sold new.

This Agfa box states Made in USA and includes a yellow insert showing "Speedex Ansco Film." It was size 116 for impressive size negatives. Mike Eckman dot com summarized the complicated history of Ansco, Agfa, and GAF company, which made film and several models of cameras. I do not know if my dad had an Ansco camera.

Worcester, Massachusetts

Approx. 1936

Hartford, Connecticut

1938

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1940

My dad never lived in Philadelphia, so I do not know why he had film developed there.

Providence, Rhode Island

I believe these negatives were from a shop in Providence, Rhode Island, because they contained some photographs of seawall damage caused by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. I will post some of them in a later article.

This ends our quick tour of processing envelopes. If I find more in the family archives (= endless stuff), I will post them later.