Sharing the Fascinating Ice Age Floods Story Since 1995
Long before the Ice Age Floods rampaged south through the scabland tracts, the Palouse River followed a southwesterly path. But the Floods overwhelmed the old river path, gouging a new southward path along a major fracture zone and forever capturing the Palouse River in an almost arrow straight path along the fracture zone.
Over the course of many Floods spilling over the basalt cliffs lining the Snake River further south, the Floods tore away at the basalt bedrock of the fracture zone, causing the basalt cliff face to retreat along the fracture zone as a “recessional cataract”. The spectacular Palouse Falls now marks the farthest northern recesson of the major cataract, but the erosional coulee extends farther northward to the original path of the Palouse River.
There are also several other examples of erosional coulees, scablands and islands of “Palouse soils” that weren’t completly eroded away by the flood waters. Those soils are organically mineral rich, fine-grained “loess” that was scraped off Canadian bedrock by the Pleistocene ice sheet. It was dumped at the southern edge of the ice sheet, and wind-blown throughout central Washington and Oregon in a layer up to 300 feet thick. The remaining Palouse soils now support verdant dry-land agriculture atop those Palouse Islands.
IAFI’s Palouse Falls Chapter serves western Whitman County, northern Franklin County, and all of Adams County from its home base in Washtucna, Washington.
Please see the Upcoming Events or the General Events Calendar for a listing of all chapter meetings and events.
Mailing Address
140 S. Ash Lane
Washtucna, WA 99371
Lloyd Stoess
President
Jacqui Hair
Vice-President
Cecelia Cochran
Secretary
Kara Harder
Treasurer
We’re reaching out to ask for your help. As we work toward our mission of promoting public awareness and education
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Upcoming IAFI Events
Chapter Location
Upcoming Chapter Events
Lloyd Stoess was a charter member of the Cheney-Palouse Chapter (name later changed to Cheney-Spokane). Later, Lee Ann Blankenship also joined. After several years of Le Ann and other requesting to form our own chapter, Lloyd finally gave in. Lloyd was hoping to have at least 20 members and 30 would be great. On Labor day weekend and the two weeks following we had information booths at three local fairs. In Ritzville we had 20 sign our petition to form a chapter. By the time we presented our Declaration to become a new chapter of the IAFI at the annual IAFI meeting in Wenatchee we were up to 35 signatures. On September 18th the 11th chapter of the IAFI was approved to serve the areas of Adams, western Whitman and northern Franklin Counties.
Officers were President, Lloyd Stoess; Vice-President, Paul Dunster; Secretary, Lee Ann Blankenship; and Treasurer, Melody Wixom. Five committee chairs were Membership, Melody Wixom; Program and Field Activities, Lloyd Stoess; Publicity, Michelle Plumb; and Nominating, Peggy Bryan. To our surprise our membership continued to grow to around 50 and after a few years continued to climb into the 80’s. Since Lloyd and Lee Ann’s experience had been with the Cheney-Spokane Chapter, most of our lectures and activities mirrored what we had learned from them.
For several years we co-sponsored a hike in the Palouse Canyon from Lyons Ferry to Palouse Falls. Up to 80 people attended this event. We hosted the annual IAIF meeting in the Fall of 2019 with close to 120 taking part in our bus tour. When Covid-19 struck in early 2020, we initiated a “Flood Photo of the Week” to keep our members involved. Since we couldn’t do bus tours, we changed to car caravan tours. Through these efforts, our membership stayed close to the same numbers.
We partner with local libraries, schools, Lacrosse Community Pride, Washtucna Community Center and Museum, and State Parks.
Ice Age Floods Institute is a registered non-profit educational organization devoted to publicly sharing the ice age floods story.
All article images on this website are used under Creative Commons license for educational purposes only and no profit is derived.
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Ice Age Floods Institute is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit EIN 91-1658221
Donations and member fees may be tax deductible
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