Spokane’s Riverfront Park – Ice Age Floods Playground
Place Spokane’s Riverfront Park – Ice Age Floods Playground Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Learn about the events that shaped our region’s geography while you play! Enjoy a 3-story slide tower, splash pad and water fall, a log jam climber, and dig for mammoth bones. Also available are basketball courts and a skateboard park. Playground Hours 6am – Dusk Learn about the events that shaped our region’s geography while you play! Enjoy a 3-story Columbian Slide Tower, Glacial Dam Splash Pad, a Log Jam Climber, an Alluvial Deposit Fossil Dig and MORE! The playground covers 40,000 square feet at Riverfront North Bank. Splash Pad Hours 11am – 7pm Special Events Host a birthday, graduation party or other special event at the North Bank shelter located at the Ice Age Floods Playground in Riverfront Park. Fill out this event inquiry form to reserve your date! Quick Facts Location:832 N Howard St, Spokane, WA 99201
Jacqui Hair
Jacqui Hair: IAFI Secretary I am a 4th generation wheat farmer in the Walla Walla, WA area. In addition to farming, I drive a school bus! Earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Whitman College sparked my continued education in geology. My love of geology brought me to an Ice Age Floods event. Eventually I served on the board of the Palouse Chapter, where I am now serving as the vice president.
Nick Zentner
Nick Zentner: Ellensburg Chapter President Nick is a geology professor at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, but he is better known internationally for his online videos covering the geology of the Pacific Northwest and his Nick on the Rocks series. Starting in the mid-2000s, he began giving public lectures about local geology topics, such as one on the Columbia River Basalt Group. These led to the production of a series of shorts he made called Two Minute Geology. He then produced the Nick on the Rocks series that aired on KCTS-TV in Seattle. During the COVID-19 pandemic Nick created live streaming lectures on various geology topics in a series called Nick From Home, focused on trying to provide an educational environment for children who might be out of school and viewers from around the world. For all of Nick’s outreach efforts, please visit his website: nickzentner.com. Nick hails from Wisconsin, but during a 1983 trip to the Pacific Northwest on break from college he was inspired to study geology, earning his Bachelor of Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1986 and Master of Science from Idaho State University in 1989. From 1989 to 1992 Nick taught geology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, then took on his current position teaching geology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. He teaches a popular “GEOL 101 – Geology of Washington” course every Fall and Winter Quarter – and his course is open and free to townspeople! In 2015, Nick received the prestigious James Shea Award, a national award recognizing exceptional delivery of Earth Science content to the general public. Past Shea Award recipients include John McPhee, Jack Horner, Robert Ballard, and Stephen Jay Gould. Nick’s wife, Liz, teaches science at Ellensburg High School, and they have three boys – Max (29), Sam (27), and Jack (25).
Consuelo Larrabee
As a child, riding on the old pre-1-90 road from Spokane to Seattle through such flat & uninteresting country was so boring…until I learned how that land was formed! Wow! “Flat & Boring” no more! I am a member of the Wenatchee Erratics and the Cheney-Spokane chapters, and a member-at-large of the IAFI Board. I co-authored the content for the information panels in the Riverfront Park Ice Age Floods Playground in Spokane. And I proselytize the Floods story everywhere I go! I found great satisfaction and stimulation in my career teaching deaf children. I particularly like puppies, baseball and bright, sunny days, and I advocate passionately for animal rights, human rights, and the arts.
Brent Cunderla
Brent Cunderla: Technical Committee Member While I was in Portland, Oregon, I began my career as a geologist with the Department of the Interior (USDI) Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In 1988 BLM transferred me to the Wenatchee Field Office as the Area Geologist where I stayed until retiring in 2015. Being located in Wenatchee allowed close proximity to explore features of the late Pleistocene glacial geology, particularly the Ice Age Floods features, especially the Channeled Scabland of eastern Washington. I worked with the National Park Service and Ice Age Floods Institute on the designation of the “Ice Age Floods-National Geologic Trail” which was authorized as a NPS unit in March 2009. I continue to give numerous talks and lead field trips to educate the public emphasizing the Geology of the Columbia Basin, Ice Age Floods, Channeled Scabland, and glacial geology of the Waterville Plateau.
The IAFI Store – In Brief
The IAFI Store is primarily an online business, offering informative maps, books, DVDs and pamphlets featuring numerous local features related to the Ice Age Floods, as well as art prints by Oregon artist, Stev Ominski, branded baseball caps, tee-shirts and decals. The store accepts checks, cash, credit card or PayPal payments. The store is run by a volunteer overseen by two board members. We learn about new offerings from publishers, authors, and member suggestions. Those suggestions are reviewed and approved before being added to the store inventory, as part of our attempts to offer a more complete and accurate story of this fascinating piece of geological history. More than ninety percent of sales are online through our website, while the remainder are done by phone, email, or on-site sales at IAFI meetings and field trips, as well as festivals and conferences. The store provides profits from its yearly sales to the Institute to help further its educational and outreach goals. Several chapters run a “Store in a Box” for a share of the profits from sales of a limited amount of merchandise provided by the store. We do not normally handle international sales due to the prohibitive cost and paperwork of international shipping. Patty Hurd, the volunteer who runs the store, says, “The job is usually enjoyable, and I have had the opportunity to meet some new friends, re-establish links with some old ones, and even help one or two international visitors get more personalized and in-depth information from members in the areas they wanted to explore in our country. All in all, it has been a blessing.”
Dinosaur Invades The UN
It is undoubtedly surreal and somewhat amusing to watch a celebrity-voiced CGI dinosaur talk about climate change. There is also something unusually enthralling and unexpectedly poignant about the idea of an extinct species warning about our own demise. Don’t know if “Enjoy!” is appropriate, but the video is definitely entertaining, and possibly motivating as well.
IAFI Board Begins Strategic Plan Update
Strategy has many definitions, but generally involves setting strategic goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. Strategy can be planned or can be observed as a pattern of activity as the organization adapts to its environment or competes. A strategic plan defines an organization’s priorities, directions and resource allocations to guide its decision making, and it’s useful for guiding and informing an organization’s teams and other, as well as for documenting progress. The last time IAFI updated its strategic plan was in 2011, so the board of directors a initiated a thorough review at their recent Sept meeting. While the basic priority areas remain unchanged (Membership Services, Education and Outreach, Trail Advocacy, Finance and Administration), many of the previous goals and strategies have been met or are outdated. Teams were assigned to review and develop new goals and strategies for each of the priority areas. The whole board will then prioritize, choose, and allocate resources for the goals IAFI will focus on for the next few years. Expect to hear more about this process in coming months.
Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Logo
After several years of coordination…Dan Foster, Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail (IAF-NGT) Superintendent, announced we have a finalized version logo for the IAF-NGT that has been accepted and that will be displayed prominently throughout the floods area. WA-DNR’s graphic designer came up with the design that the Logo Committee believes best captures the essence of the meaning behind this national trail. During this process they faced a difficult task to capture something that was abstract, expressed itself visually in many different ways to represent the flood area, and reflected a story that is generally not well known to the public…now comes the work to sign the 4-state trail. Dan plans on sending out guidance to all the Trail partners on the proper use of the logo. Work is currently underway to develop a “Signing the Trail Plan”. This plan will give us a fairly accurate number for how many logo signs will be needed throughout the floods area. Until now we have only had a very rough guess. Having a more accurate figure for the number of logo signs that will be needed will give us a more accurate cost for making the signs and posts. It will also help the State DOT’s determine what it will cost them to install the logo signs and posts. Dan Foster has started people working on this and hopes to have the plan done this spring. They still have lots of unanswered questions about this process (i.e. how to pay for manufacturing and installing the logo posts) but to finally have a logo was the necessary first step. We started with several conceptual drawings from members of the logo committee and colleagues, but ended up using the services of a number of talented designers whose time was donated by their agency. During this process, a vast number of logos were drafted, but not chosen. Through this we learned the logic, recognition and cognitive association of a logo with its object. We appreciate all who worked on this and couldn’t have done it without them. Because of the difficulty in portraying the scientific nature of the trail, we spent considerable time focusing on designing a literal geologic translation of Ice Age Floods. However, what seemed to work in one place didn’t in another. What worked for instantaneous public recognition didn’t reflect the geologic accuracy this approach demanded. It took time for us to shift our point of view, but we were convinced when graphics designer Dan Coe with Washington Department of Natural Resources tried something different and it resonated with us. The adopted design is a contemporary scene that reflects the primary public purpose of the Trail as stated in its establishing legislation, to enable “the public to view, experience, and learn about the features and story of the Ice Age floods…” I think this approach communicates that there is something incredible to see and experience as one travels along the route, something that is consistent with the overall interpretive goal and approach of the Trail. While there may not be 100% concurrence for the logo from everyone, we think the logo to be distinctive enough that the public will be able to easily distinguish it from the many other trail logos in our Region. More importantly, we believe the logo captures the essence of the landscape that J. Harlan Bretz saw and used as the basis for first recognizing the former Ice Age Floods. The effort on the logo is symbolic of the entire trail partnership. We have an immense story with lots of players and opinions to disseminate it. Tasks ahead of us will also take time to reach consensus, but that consensus will be the strength of the trail moving forward over the coming years, even as we all come and go in our various roles.
IAFI Gorge(ous) Night Out in Salem & Olympia
Columbia Gorge Chapter of IAFI has joined the party It’s easy to see what makes the Gorge a spectacular experience to visitors, but what makes it special to those who live here, work here, and raise our families here? What parts do we play in the larger economic and political fabrics of the states and nation we’re part of? One Gorge (a young Gorge advocacy group) is trying to share who we are and why we matter at the state and national levels, and to promote the big infrastructure factors to help the Gorge community excel. To help our states of Oregon and Washington to better understand and recognize the who, what, and why of interests in the Gorge, One Gorge has worked with Gorge legislators to organize a 2nd annual Gorge(ous) Night Out for Oregon legislators in Salem, and a first-time event with Washington legislators in Olympia. These casual events bring a selection local businesses and organizations sharing products and information together with legislators just to make them more aware of the vibrancy of the Gorge. We’re bringing Columbia Gorge(ous) Geology and the Ice Age Floods to these parties. Two new 40″ x 60″ displays were finished in time for the Salem event on Feb. 3rd and they were extremely popular. Some suggested we were second in popularity only to Insitu UAVs, but we were also located immediately adjacent to the food table, so factor that into the popularity poll. Now everything is ready and tested for the Olympia event on Feb. 9th for Washington legislators, and we’re hoping to build some support there for the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail that is focused to a large extent on Washington. Although the main purpose of the Ice Age Floods Institute usually appears to be for education, outreach, and research, it is important to realize that we also have a strong advocacy role to play. When you support the Institute you are also a player in all our education, outreach, research, and advocacy efforts. Thanks to all for your support.