Washington Lakes--Lost and Found

This is Disappearing Lake in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest the Mount Adams Ranger District in Klickitat County. It’s part of the gorgeous South Prairie and functions as a wetland and prairie in the summer, a basin for holding rain, snow, and ice in the fall and winter, and a lake for a very short period in the spring.

You’ve probably heard of Mt. Hood (second largest volcano in Lower 48), the town of Hood River, Oregon (famous as a wind-surfing, soft-fruit, and craft-beer mecca) and it’s sister town, White Salmon, Washington (white-water rafting, mellow non-Hood-River vibe). You may also be familiar with Gifford Pinchot National Forest—the 1.3 million acres of forested land stretching north from the Columbia River gorge.

As a day hiker who defaults to the Olympic Peninsula and Mt. Rainier for recreating, I have only occasionally visited this beautiful part of Washington State. A few times to hike in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and once to survey for the egg masses of the endangered Oregon Spotted Frog. Never once did I hear or read about Disappearing Lake or the lake from which the town of Trout Lake gets its name.

Not until I began my research on Washington Lakes and lake swimming and watched a 2014 episode of Oregon Field Guide (it’s just 6 minutes long, worth a viewing) did I learn about Disappearing Lake. It doesn’t show up on most maps or Forest-Service road signs. It’s just called South Prairie. Which makes sense. It’s part of an extensive prairie south of Mt. Adams and is a prairie from mid-summer to late-fall and then, when the rains come the prairie begins to fill with water. The water that fills a lava tube freezes and acts like a plug in a bathtub. The prairie fills up with rainwater and snow and, in late spring, emerges as a beautiful lake you can canoe and kayak on if you time it right. Like most of my wilderness adventures (see my blog on Banks Lake), I’m always a bit off on my timing of natural spectacles. We arrived in mid-June having just missed the canoe-able—and I had hoped chilly-but-swimmable—period of Disappearing Lake. Alas, I’d pack my wetsuit again next spring and be ready to head to the lake on a moment’s notice to try again.

Not wanting to feel foolish about driving for 4 hours with a canoe strapped to the top of our car and not getting it wet, we headed for Goose Lake. But it was raining heavily that Friday afternoon and there was a fishing derby on the lake the next day. So my husband and I up Sleeping Beauty instead for bit of aerobic exercise and a spectacular view of Mt. Adams dancing with the cumulus clouds. What could top this as a consolation prize?

Mt. Adams and the clouds from atop a rock formation known as “Sleeping Beauty.”

On the way back from the hike, we drove through the town of Trout Lake, wondering exactly the eponymous lake was and why there were no signs (not even the subtle Forest Service brown ones) advertising its presence. My husband had a hunch we might have luck following Lake Rd. a road marked as a Dead End. A few minutes later, we parked our car at a classic wooden kiosk and were happy to discover we needed a Discovery Pass. We had arrived at the Trout Lake Natural Area Preserve (NAP) managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The lake was part lake, part creek, part wetland and a hot spot for the endangered Oregon Spotted Frog.

On our left was an interpretive trail that hugged the southwest side of the creek and wetland. Here we learned that an avalanche of volcanic debris and mud, known as a lahar, flowed down from Mt. Adams about 6,000 years ago. The lahar traveled some 35 miles, following the river channels and leaving deposits as thick as 65 feet. The lahar raised the floor of the White Salmon River, thus blocking one of its tributaries—today’s Trout Lake Creek. The newly formed lake was much more extensive than it is today; sedimentation, especially over the last 50 years, has been filling in the open lake, increased the wetlands.

After our short trail walk, we returned to our car and noticed a pair of flip-flops on the muddy edge of the water. That was the only sign I needed that it was time to grab my wetsuit and goggles and launch the canoe.

We weren’t sure if we’d be paddling in a creek or a lake or deadend in a meadow of reed canary grass or for how long before we got stuck, but the water called. To our delight and amazement, we paddled for a good 30 minutes up the most gentle, intimate little waterway a Discover Pass could buy. The shore was undeveloped the bank was tangled with all the makings of a Hollywood riparian buffer: reeds, sedges, rushes, grasses, willows, snags, and cottonwood trees further off. Paddling upstream was easy and the water so inviting.

We pulled off in an eddy at a very grassy spot and, with Oregon Spotted Frog tadpoles wiggling around my toes, I braced myself for a plunge into the clear cold water flowing off Mt. Adams in the distance.

Despite my attempt at looking relaxed (what’s with my right foot?), it was nearly impossible to go gently into that good lake. Or any lake-river that takes your breath away and leaves you uttering ridiculous but ultimately helpful self-motivating phrases.

Getting upstream was harder than I thought. But worth the effort. My first-ever downstream swim was like flying.

Banks Lake

 Standing on the rim of the spectacular Dry Falls canyon 400 feet high and 3 miles wide and looking down into still pools of water, it is hard to imagine what was once the world’s largest waterfall flowing over this rim. “Flowing” hardly describes what the water was doing. It was churning, chewing, rushing, gushing, flooding, scouring, plucking, wrenching, and muscling its way through the layers of volcanic basalt of the Columbia Plateau on its way toward the Pacific Ocean. Where did all this water come from? During the end of the Pleistocene ice age, between 18,000 and 15,000 year ago, when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered much of North America, a glacier a half a mile thick advanced southward from Canada into the Idaho panhandle where it blocked the flow of the Clark Fork River. This caused the river to back up into the mountain valleys and form a vast lake known as Glacial Lake Missoula, in what is today western Montana. At its peak, this lake was 2,100-feet deep and held over 530 cubic miles of water (as much as Lakes Eerie and Ontario combined). When the ice dam broke up, all that water was released across the landscape and emptied Glacial Lake Missoula in a matter of a few days. The water flooded across the Columbia Plateau at speeds of up to 65 mph, carrying with it huge blocks of ice, massive boulders, columns of basalt, trees, animals, anything in it is path. The water eventually followed the course of the Columbia River, south and then west to the Pacific Ocean.

These epic ice-damming-and-flooding events happened not once, but as many as seventytimes during this period. Known as the Missoula Floods or the Spokane Floods, these flooding events created a landscape as magnificent as the more eloquently named Grand Canyon, thought that natural treasure is the work of the relatively slow and patient work of the Colorado River, not the multiple cataclysms of a single lake. 

The floods created a regional landscape known, unfortunately, as “channeled scablands.” Yes, the floods did carve channels in the basalt. Yes, the eroded-but-remaining ragged basalt “islands” between the channels could appear to resemble raised scabs on skin, but really? 

The name “channeled scablands” was coined in the 1920s by the now-famous geologist J. Harlen Bretz, who proved to the very-resistant scientific community that ancient cataclysmic floods –and not eons of slow erosion--created this unique landscape. Though “scabland” was already in use by the locals, I wonder if anyone (Harlen’s wife, Fanny, perhaps) suggested that perhaps “Glacial Glorylands” or “Channeled Heartland” might have been a better choice.

Glacial Lake Missoula was not the only glacial lake within the channeled scablands stretching across Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. In Washington, Glacial Lake Columbia formed 50 miles north of present-day Coulee City, when a Pleistocene-era glacier blocked a section of the west-flowing Columbia River that drained through this area. The Columbia was diverted southward where it augmented the work of Glacial Lake Missoula carving a series of canyons known today as “Grand Coulee.” 

Map from National Geographic’s “Channeled Scablands.” Read excellent story here.

Coulee is a geologic term, describing canyons or ravines formed by water erosion or floods. Coulee is derived from the French couler, meaning “to flow.” The only explanation I have read for why this very American piece of real estate has a fancy French name comes from my trusty Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests the word may have entered the lexicon through French fur trappers in the Oregon region, trappers who were presumably used this word while tramping through steep terrain en route to blessedly flat beaver ponds and meadows. 

The Grand Coulee features two main canyons. The northern canyon holds Banks Lake and is filled with water diverted from the Columbia by the Grand Coulee Dam. The southern canyon holds no lake but several small lakes. These groundwater-filled lakes are not for swimming or fishing but for stretching our imaginations. These ponds were once the deep plunge pools of the diverted and flooding Columbia River as it reshaped itself into a 3.5-mile-wide waterfall that dropped 400 feet from its lip. Though these falls would have once dwarfed Niagara Falls, the retreat of the Columbia River to its old channel left us with the more stunning and less touristy geologic wonder now known as Dry Falls.  

Had the northern half of the Grand Coulee not been dammed in 1942, Banks Lake would likely look very similar to Dry Falls: a steep-walled coulee of exposed basalt and worn bedrock holding small lakes. Imagine the southern end of the Dry Falls coulee being dammed and then being filled with water diverted from the Columbia. When you swim in Banks Lake, this is what you are swimming in.

The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam began in 1933 during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get Americans back to work after The Depression (it employed 12,000 during several years of construction). This U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project was initially conceived to create a storage and delivery system of water for farmland irrigation, but now the dam also generates hydroelectric power (it’s the largest producer in the U.S.) and has created popular recreational lakes. Behind the dam is Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake Recreation Area and below are Banks Lake, Lake Lenore, Soap Lake, and several smaller ice-age lakes that offer fishing, swimming, boating. 

These lakes are partly natural. The wide channels were carved by ice-age flooding but the lakes are not fed by groundwater, rain or snow melt, or an inflow stream. They are fed by an artificial canal that flows upstream of the Grand Coulee Dam. Though the Columbia River itself no longer not flow through Banks Lake, it’s water—via the feeder canal—does. 

This this aerial photo above shows the Grand Coulee Dam, the feeder canal in the center, and the 27-mile-long Banks Lake in the entire upper half of the photo. Banks Lake is actually a reservoir. Twelve of the world’s largest pumps draw water from Roosevelt Lake and pump it into Banks Lake. From there the water is delivered via siphons, pumps and thousands of miles of waterways (canals) to irrigate 600,000 acres of farmland south of the lake. If you squint at your Washington road atlas, you’ll spot the Main Canal as well as the “Bacon Siphon” south of Banks Lake. (Yes, The Bacon Siphon would make a good name of a roadside diner. Down-the-rabbit-hole history on naming of Bacon here.

Water from the Columbia River is diverted from the Grand Coulee Dam and pumped up into Banks Lake via this engineered canal. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

When I moved to Washington in 2006, the Missoula Floods popped up in conversation every once in a while (the Bacon Siphon never did), but I retained only that these floods were humongous and originated in Montana. Even when, a few years later, I made my first trip to eastern Washington with friends for a late-summer “swim tour” of Banks Lake, the geologic history of coulee country and the channeled scablands just washed over me. I believe I was so preoccupied with the Big Swim, with keeping pace with my serious long-distance swimmer friends, and with not getting hypothermic and drowning that I did not fully embrace the terror of water, ice, boulders, and basalt, that was the legacy of the now lovely and becalmed Banks Lake.

What I remember of my Banks Lake swim a decade ago seems like a dream. It was September and post peak tourist season. It was 90-degrees hot, sunny, dry, and the landscape was nothing like western Washington. We parked near a campground at Steamboat Rock State Park and then walked down a deserted trail to a white sandy beach. The three of us got in the water and set our sights across the narrow passage in Devil’s Punchbowl to the east side of the lake. When we noticed a lull in motorboat traffic, we swam like mad across the passage and then entered a cove. The cove was a narrow labyrinth of half-submerged boulders. The labyrinth was too narrow for a kayak and, in places, just wide enough for a single swimmer. 

During our swim, we pulled ourselves out of the water and onto the sun-warmed rocks to take the chill off. Once our goosebumps were gone and our skin was dry, we slipped back into the water and the rest of the world slipped away. This was unlike any place I had ever been or dreamed of. We swam for hours here and further south at Lake Lenore. We were floating the ice-age channel filled with water from the Columbia River. We were swimming in the landscape. This is one of the things I love most about swimming in lakes. I’m in water but I feel nestled in the solid Earth.

I spend a lot of time walking in forests and, short of getting inside a hollow tree or digging myself a hole in the forest floor and lying down in it, I have not yet managed to reach that immersive state that I do in a lake. Though I am working on imagining I am inthe sweet moist atmosphere of the forest, I am still walking among trees and shrubs. 

In hindsight, I am glad that I swam unencumbered by the geologic history of this place, by familiarity with the workings of the Grand Coulee Dam, the network of irrigation siphons and canals, the flooded towns and lost homesteads, and impact on the Colville tribe that fished the Columbia River above the dam, the meaning of the word “reclamation.”

I cannot remember the clarity of the water, whether or not there were submerged plants to swim through, or if I could see the bottom of the lake. Alas, I’ve lost any photographs I might have taken on this trip. My memory has been distilled into “it felt really good.” The water. The rocks. The depth. The sun. But mostly the water.

I’ll post on Banks Lake again after I find my way back to the labyrinth this summer. My poorly timed spring visit proved to be too early. My once deliciously liquid lake was still frozen.

Nice to have Banks Lake locked in ice for my tour of my Ice-Age Geology tour of the Grand Coulee. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

FOR FURTHER READING…

Just some of the readily available books on how our friend, the water molecule, ganged up on the Columbia Plateau. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

Can’t Get Enough?

Check out the Washington State Department of Natural Resources’s beautiful Washington’s Ice-Age Floods story map.

And here are some maps and resources from the Ice Age Flood Institute on the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.

The Lake-Swimming Adventures Begin

One hot, dry September nearly a decade ago, I traveled with two friends to swim in the lakes south of the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington. We spent hours in both Lake Lenore and Banks Lake swimming in the refreshingly cool water after long hikes in the dry, cactus-loving hills above the lakes. And I do mean swimming—crawl, breast stroke, back stroke—not just dipping into the shallows to cool off. 

Ten years ago, I was newish to Washington and to the story of the Missoula Floods that shaped this strange landscape. I remember being impressed by the strange basalt cliffs and asking my family to imagine the boulder fields of Joshua Tree National Monument laid out in the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then to imagine the canyon flooded with water to leave the tops of the boulders exposed. That’s what it was like swimming in these lakes. When I turned my head to breathe while swimming in Lake Lenore, my face was inches from the sheer basalt walls. In Banks Lake, you could swim into a maze-like cove strewn with sun-warmed boulders, crawl out onto a boulder to warm up, then slip right back into the water. 

It was sublime.

But I had since forgotten exactly where that Banks Lake cove was and I wanted to swim there again. After a spate of unseasonably warm March days in Olympia, I packed my wetsuit and my husband and I strapped the canoe on the car for a weekend at the lake.

Alas, Banks Lake was not how I remembered it.

Why didn’t anyone tell me it got really really cold in eastern Washington in winter? Photo by M.D. .Ruth.

Yes, that’s ice. Except for the liquid water along the nearshore, Banks Lake was frozen. 

Yes, I could have found this out with a simple phone call, but it was inconceivable to me that all that water could have frozen at all or could still be frozen. Though I’ve been living in Washington for 12 years, I am still very newish to eastern Washington.

I was disappointed but luckily, there was a vast landscape to explore by foot and car. There was much geology to see and understand. And I was happy to embrace the legacy of the Missoula Floods without installing an ice-breaker on the prow of our canoe or getting hypothermia.

Embracing the Missoula Floods meant doing my homework and reading a few of the excellent books on this subject. It meant studying the interpretive signs posted along the highways that lead from Soap Lake to the Grand Coulee Dam along Highways 17 and 155. It meant asking my husband (the geology major) lots of questions he cannot answer because it’s just too incredible. And—most importantly—it meant giving my imagination plenty of time to expand to take in the scope and magnitude of the floods. 

Next Blog: Why Banks Lake is a lake and why it is where it is.

Battle Ground Lake

This does not look like the kind of place I would expect to find in a place called Battle Ground, Washington. Nor the kind of place I would associate with a volcanic eruption. Battle Ground Lake is  too peaceful, beautiful, and lush. And, on one of the hottest days of Summer 2018 so far, it was a place full of happy human beings enjoying the simple pleasures of a cool lake in a state park. Listen:

There were hundreds of people on one side of the lake at a small beach area, picnic tables, a dock, and restrooms. Everyone seemed happy. It was as if everyone checked any grouchiness and stress at the entrance gate. Whether people arrived with picnic coolers, silly inflatable floating devices, swim goggles, kayaks, stand-up boards, beach chairs, or paperback books, everyone was enjoying themselves and--it seemed to me--happy others were enjoying themselves. Even when, late in the afternoon, someone cranked up their boombox with classic rock and roll hits--no one glowered or complained. A few swimmers were actually dancing to "Eye of Tiger" as they stood waist-high in the water on the concrete boat ramp. 

The sounds from the shore created a pleasant summer din as my friend and I swam the perimeter of this 27-acre lake. We rested on logs floating along the lakeshore. We watched very small fish take an interest in our wiggling toes (big, fat worms!). Near the rope swing, we dog paddled to watch young teens scramble up the steep muddy hill and then swing out over the water for a plunge that looked so fun and sounded so refreshing it brought a smile to my face. 

Battle Ground Lake is named for a battle that never took place near present-day Battle Ground in 1855--a non-battle involving Klickitat tribes living on the Lewis and Cowlitz Rivers, U.S. troops stationed at Fort Vancouver, and  "friendly fire" mistakes. The origin of the town and lake name is not half as interesting as the origin of the lake itself. 

According to the U.S. Geologic Survey, Battle Ground Lake in Washington, a maar volcano, was formed when magma encountered water and blasted through a 100,000 year old lava flow. This is one of the youngest volcanoes in an area known as the Boring Lava Field, which extends east and north from the Vancouver-Portland area. Battle Ground Lake is one of 80 volcanic vents and associated lava flows evident in the area. Geologists believe many other vents were buried during the Missoula Floods.

The map below shows some of the Boring Volcanic Field. Battle Ground Lake is not shown here but is located in the orange areas at the top of the map, east of the I-5 and on the south side of the East Fork of the Lewis River. More on the Boring Volcanic Field from the USGS here.

Map image from USGS, Everts et al 2009

The skyline in this region and its 1980 eruption is still so fresh in my memory that I have to remind myself that, even though Mount St. Helens transformed the local landscape, Mount St. Helens was not the only show in town. 

The lake I was swimming was created about 100,000 years  before Mount St. Helens' 1980 eruption. I knew I was swimming in an older landscape. I was swimming in a 60-foot deep lesson in local geology. I was swimming the cool refreshing legacy of ancient magma and boiling water. 

Evidence of Battle Ground Lake's geologic history is easy to see if you walk/hike the 1-mile long Lower Lake trail in the park. Here is a chunk of volcanic basalt with vesicles formed by trapped gas. The Lower Lake trail winds through mature evergreen forest--and offers plenty of shade, access points to the lake and the rope swing. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

For more information,  WA State Park website or  Washington Trails Association website for a description of the Lower Lake trail. More on the Boring Volcanic Field from the USGS's Cascades Volcanic Observatory here.