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This map is intended as an aid to help you explore important features in the Pacific Northwest area. Use your scroll wheel to zoom, click-hold to drag the map around, click on markers for details, photos, and links to more information. For an index of sites click the ‘Expand Index’ icon (map title bar, left side) or View Larger Map icon (map title bar, right side).
Though we try to maintain accuracy, the Ice Age Floods Institute does not guarantee the accuracy of any information represented on this map. This map is provided solely as an educational service to our members and guests.
Suggestions for features not yet on the maps are welcome. Click here to submit your suggestions.
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About Puget Lobe Glacialscapes
During the peak of the most recent Ice Age, the vast Cordilleran continental ice sheet covered southwestern Canada and northern parts of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Glacial ice, thousands of feet thick, expanded south into western Washington from mountain ranges in western Canada. One lobe occupied the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and another lobe covered the Puget Lowland.
Although western Washington was isolated from the cataclysmic Missoula Floods east of the Cascades, it experienced different, but still massive effects of glacial ice and water that were both significant sculptors of the landscape. The weight of the ice actually depressed the land by several hundred feet, and the moving ice and meltwater gouged and scoured the landscape. Water that pooled south of the ice sheet in the Puget Lowland escaped to the Pacific Ocean via the Chehalis River valley. Rivers from the western Cascade Range and eastern Olympic Mountains added to the huge volumes of meltwater from the ice sheet. When the ice finally melted back it left behind indelible marks of its presence as Puget Sound reconnected with the Strait of Juan de Fuca and drainage to the Pacific Ocean was restored to what it is today. Although largely hidden by extensive vegetation, roads, housing, and commercial development, the Puget Lowland exhibits a rich variety of glacial Ice Age geologic features.
Explore 11 new chapter-specific brochures that are guides to key regional features of the Ice Age Floods and to ice-age glaciation in the Puget Lobe area.