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The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of Washington state.
The Channeled Scablands extend from the area around Spokane, west to the Columbia River near Vantage and southwest to the Snake River near Pasco. They are known as the "Channeled Scablands" because they are crisscrossed by long channels cut into the bedrock, called coulees.
The first farmers in the region named the rocky parts “scablands” and dismissed them as useless as they planted their wheat on the silt-rich hills. But geologists were not so dismissive; to them, the scablands were an enigma. What could have caused this landscape?
The part of the lava field that underlies the Scablands in eastern Washington is a saucer-shaped area of about 15,000 square miles almost completely surrounded by mountains and nearly encircled by three rivers—the Columbia, the Spokane, and the Snake (Fig. 2, page 3).
Remnant of a lost landscape, this island of ancient soil—crowned by a crop of wheat—survived the ice-age floods that sculpted the region known today as the Channeled Scablands.
This horseshoe-shaped canyon was formed when floodwaters dropped more than 260 meters (850 feet) in less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Quincy Basin to the Columbia River Valley, stripping away topsoil and eroding the basalt.
The Scablands, principally located in southeastern Washington state, bear the signs of an incredible Ice Age event. Between 14,000 and 18,200 years ago, huge glacial lakes on the boundaries of...
It's a land seemingly starved of rain in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. But the dry landscape known as the “Scablands” actually tells a story about excess—excess of water, water that ...
The easternmost stream, 20 miles wide in places and locally 600 feet deep, carved the widest channel, the Cheney-Palouse Tract. A middle river carved the Crab Creek Channel and its tributaries, a tract about 14 miles wide crossed near its head by U. S. Highway 2 between Davenport and Creston.
What are the Channeled Scablands? Part of the Columbia Plateau, the Channeled Scablands can be found on a majority of the southern half of the park. It is a type of shrub-steppe ecosystem, which is characterized by large shrubs, broadleaf wildflowers, and a large diversity of grass species.