Palouse Islands

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hi everybody and welcome to the Paloo.

[00:00:03][snorts] This is a scouting video today.

[00:00:06]We're talking about Paloo Islands and we're talking about Paloo Falls in the Paloo River Canyon.

[00:00:14]Thanks for joining us. Let's get started.

[00:00:18]If this is your concept of the Paloo, mine too.

[00:00:23]Uh this is dry land wheat meaning that the wheat is grown without irrigation without water being piped in here and uh these soils are uh are ready for retaining moisture.

[00:00:41]Um and the grain size is just right to retain enough moisture to allow these uh bushels and bushels of wheat to be grown every year. Uh, but also you can do it without hauling a bunch of water out of the Snake River or the Colombia or anything else. So, dryland wheat is the phrase as I've learned.

[00:01:05]So, where are we?

[00:01:08]Uh, here's Vantage, Washington.

[00:01:13]Spokane, Washington, John Stockton's house. So, I90 goes about like this.

[00:01:20]And so we are south of that.

[00:01:23]The Snake River is way down here at the bottom. Let me zoom in. Let me zoom in.

[00:01:32]So we are in this area with this scouting video today. And you'll notice the Paloo River is coming from the north and is actually coming from Idaho. And the Paloo River is threading its way through some of these graceful hills.

[00:01:48]And then the Paloo River does an abrupt turn to the south and dumps into the Snake.

[00:01:56]And some of you may know that before the ice age, the Paloo River uh got its way to the Colombia River through Washtaknikuli.

[00:02:06]But something happened here to divert the Paloo River and have it do a shortcut over this ridge and dump into the snake itself.

[00:02:16]And this is coming from an old classic docu document called the chneled scabland by uh Vic Baker. And this is a um former CWU geology professor Don Ring's copy which is falling apart. But uh thank you Don. I wish you were still with us.

[00:02:39]And uh I'm kind of up here. So, you know, Paloo Falls, at least some of you know Paloo Falls State Park. And here's the road coming in from Wash Tucka. Uh, get off of 26. Uh, get yourself on this paved road [snorts] and work your way to Paloo Falls. So, that canyon is very straight and then it's zigzaggy and then we dump into the snake. But, I'm over here.

[00:03:08]I'm over here at these isolated little islands of Paloo Loose.

[00:03:14]And I think if I zoom back out, I think if Brady is here and he gets his drone going and I come down the road here a bit, we're kind of looking souththeast now.

[00:03:31]Sorry, we're looking southwest.

[00:03:35]Um it's it's these elongate hills. So from this vantage point, this looks just like a conicle pile, doesn't it? Uh but it's not conicle. That's the idea that there is a this is a ridge that is going away from us.

[00:03:56]And that's a ridge that we can kind of see in profile.

[00:04:03]And there's a number of these. It's like these caterpillars, these big fuzzy caterpillars uh that are all parallel to each other.

[00:04:14]But why are they like that?

[00:04:17]And I think many of you are geology fans and you already know the answer. But uh let me just continue to uh talk basically here.

[00:04:28]So, as we drop down on this suddenly paved road, uh we're dropping off a scarp. That's the term that's used out here. It's uh this goes back to Bretts 100 years ago.

[00:04:42]It probably looked about like this.

[00:04:44]Maybe it wasn't paved here, but otherwise, this looks exactly the way that it did with Jay. Harlen Brett was out here with his University of Chicago students in the 1920 20s.

[00:04:56]And so as we drop, there's a reason we're dropping.

[00:05:01]And we're dropping because everything was mantled in loose, which is windblown silt.

[00:05:09]And can you picture just a continuous mantling of let's say 200 ft of thick soils?

[00:05:18]and and in in road cut here. This wouldn't be a bad place to uh look at some of the lus Brady. I guess if we can get rid of some of the garbage.

[00:05:31]Um so good exposure of some of this windb blown silt [snorts] and it's just it's oh somebody's been digging here. Maybe an animal or maybe a geologist. I'm not sure.

[00:05:48]But I mean there's there's not a whole lot to talk about with the list itself.

[00:05:53]It's just so homogeneous.

[00:05:58]But I think somehow playing with this transition and capturing this transition.

[00:06:07]Yeah, this must be a badger hole.

[00:06:10][snorts] I don't know much about biology, but a burrowing animal of some sort, but in the distance, if I can zoom way in, there's some rolling hills there.

[00:06:29]They're truncated. So, what's the scarp?

[00:06:32]The scarp is the abrupt edge where we suddenly lose the hills.

[00:06:41]And the hills are gone here.

[00:06:44]But this is the real reason I stopped here.

[00:06:51]We did have a kind of a pre-production Zoom meeting with Brady and Gary and myself.

[00:06:58]And Brady's like, "Wow, if those are really as impressive as they appear on imagery, um, man, this is and yes, come on.

[00:07:12]Isn't this worth an episode, Brady?"

[00:07:17]Again, they're not conicle piles. They are they are like salmon all kind of work swimming towards us. They're coming upstream. They've got their heads upstream and their tails downstream.

[00:07:34]And you're like, why are you talking about water suddenly?

[00:07:39]I'm talking about water because the Missoula floods came from the north.

[00:07:45]The Cheni Paloo flood track cruising through here and totally removing the loose.

[00:07:55]But in a few of these places, sculpting the loose but leaving these isolated um petrified salmon. What Yeah, I think right in here next to an abandoned homestead, I think something like this, Brady, could be uh an excellent place to uh to talk about the loose, to talk about the the hills, to talk about the wheat. The wheat's looking pretty damn good right now.

[00:08:59]And that loose hills twominute thing I sent you. I think Tom Foster and I were right here.

[00:09:08]That place that everybody thinks is Microsoft background or whatever screen saver was right in here.

[00:09:21]Yeah. So, we can go up this road a ways if you like, but I I think I think it's all right here. I think this this is looking great.

[00:09:33]So, I think this is our loose spot to film, assuming you want to film a loose standup.

[00:09:46]And you can certainly zoom above me. You can get the red shirt uh tight and then you can sorry and then you can fly away from me and just have endless slopes of green and blue sky and then truly uh four minutes away.

[00:10:12]We'll just do this in one continuous shot.

[00:10:16]Now I'm driving essentially west and uh oh uh oh some of our rolling hills are getting interrupted.

[00:10:25]So there's one of our scarps.

[00:10:29]You can kind of see the brown where the the slope just steepens.

[00:10:34]And if that appeals to you Brady, we can we can just ask why why are we suddenly getting a steep uh slope?

[00:10:42]Because we just established that these loose hills are so contoured. They're so graceful. There there's never an inter interruption. Well, this is an interruption. Why? Cuz some Missoula flood water came right through here, right between that building and the other slope.

[00:11:01]And then we pick it up again.

[00:11:05]We get to our first island. Yeah, this is good right here.

[00:11:12]Rolling hills. Rolling hills. But there's a chasm because the the the flood waters, the Missoula floods snuck through here.

[00:11:23]And they didn't do a complete job. They didn't take everything away, but there's this kind of graceful scalpel that these Missoula floods were using right through here. This wasn't the main channel. This was kind of places where the flood waters were big enough, fast enough, deep enough to creep their way, creeps probably wrong to surge their way uh into the high and dry places and take stuff away here. But it wasn't a total job. I guess that's the point. It wasn't a total job.

[00:12:00]It was a partial job.

[00:12:02]And so these petrified salmon, I doubt you'll want me to use that, but I happen to like it at the moment.

[00:12:12]I'm going to keep this shot. Keep myself hanging off the window.

[00:12:20]Come on. Come on.

[00:12:25]Guess. Let's zoom out. Yeah.

[00:12:30]Now we come down the major scarp. Ah, there it is. There it is. I'll stay out.

[00:12:46]If you're out here driving around without thinking about geology, how could you not be curious about those hills? I know it's possible, maybe even likely, but I don't know. Loose.

[00:12:59]That's the we're building an episode around that. Look, I think Loose Islands or Paloo Islands.

[00:13:10]And I don't know, you're the pro, but like what if you what if you start with this kind of profile, but then you lift and realize that there's a whole tail heading to the south.

[00:13:23]And we become very very curious about that. Now, can I walk around on people's land? I guess not. So, if you like me, m may I'm walking up this road.

[00:13:35]Maybe it's truly a a a poll episode where I'm I'm confined to this uh road.

[00:13:47]Yeah. I I think this is a show. I think this is an episode.

[00:13:55]>> [snorts] >> And it's more of a maybe it's a droneheavy show with an occasional host walking down a gravel road in a red shirt.

[00:14:10]I don't think we really need the guy in the red shirt to be climbing around on top of one of these.

[00:14:18]And if we do, maybe I know of a spot at the other road.

[00:14:30]Okay, that's good. Thank you.