On the Rocks

April 2008

Walking the Dog in Geologic Time
by Leopold Hayden Powell

Dogs display reluctance and wrath
If you try to give them a bath.
They bury bones in hideaways,
And half the time they run sideways.
-- Ogden Nash, in "The Face Is Familiar," 1941

Take your dog for walks, here and there in Kettle Falls. You might be out for a fitness jog or just a stroll. Just head for the edge of town.

The first loop takes us a little over a mile, around the west. Walk west, along Old Kettle Road. The terrain takes a sharp dip, then rise, in sharp contrast to the main part of Kettle Falls. Turn northerly, onto Josephine Street, or take the off-roader track east of the houses. This pine woods surface is more rolling. A few skeletons of fescue and wheatgrass stick up, from the green sprouts and pinecones. The soil is fine and sandy, rather than the mix of coarse sand and clay in town. Turning onto the two-track, south of the railroad, we circle an irregular depression. Drainage has no way out. Moisture simply sinks into the sand. Now up a slight rise, and down toward the sewage ponds. These are usually good for waterfowl sightings. We are headed back, across the railroad and up the grade, along Highway 395 and Third Street. That last down and up is more broad, but it is the same trough as at first.

When an ice lobe occupied the Columbia Valley, melt water, stream gravel and lakebed silt built up along the flanks. Fierce winds off the northern ice sheet built sand dunes on that surface. Blind valleys and sandy soil remain from those dunes. When the glacier melted, one side of the stream and lakebed prism was left unsupported. One large block slipped down and slightly to the west. A sliver cracked away, slipping to the east. Those two breaks are faults -- parallel, growth faults with down-dropped sides facing each other. You have just crossed and re-crossed a graben valley, with very gently sloping lakebed to the east and a dune tract on the west.

If you're out for real exercise, finish by heading up Gold Hill Road. It's a powerful push, up the fifteen percent grade, to the high end of the borrow pit. Take a breather, and look for bits of carbonized plants and shell in the broken rocks. Two hundred eighty million years ago, this was a shallow shelf of a sea, bounded by volcanoes and studded by reefs. Calcite leached from the reefs and gypsum from the volcanic ash cements slabs of breccia, formed in recent time. Kick your way down the hill. You have a choice of delis for a coffee or skinny latte, as a reward for exercise virtue.

The classic stroll is down Juniper Street and Greenwood Loop, to Meyers Falls. You may already know that the Falls tumble over forty-four million year old andesite. The Sanpoil Volcanic Formation lavas form a large part of a "lazy D" shaped block, from here to a mile west of Colville and bulging northeast of Highway 395. Blocks of this sort of rock are spread from just east of Newport, south of Hunters, west of Midway, B.C., to Whitestone Mountain west of Tonasket. How far the spread was, at the time of eruption, is open to debate. It is most likely that the Newport to Tonasket distance was 90 miles, compared to the present 125 miles.

To look at the glacial lakebeds, walk about fifty yards east of the falls. Clumps of Blue Wildrye fall from the steep road cut bank, exposing the beds. The layers of silt and very fine sand are one-fourth to one inch thick. The lake extended, at least, to Inkler's Point, north of Valley -- about 30 miles in a smooth line, 42 miles along the Colville River. The south end of the lake is 26 feet higher than downtown Kettle Falls. Without the weight of ice, the land has rebounded that far.

The small reservoir of Meyer's Falls Dam is a prime place for bird watching. Red-winged and Yellow-headed Blackbirds vie for nest territory in the Cattails and Bulrushes. What else might you discover of nature's stories?

The North Columbia Monthly provides news, views, humor and a calendar of events for an area that stretches from Nelson in British Columbia south to Spokane in Washington State and covers all points in between. A free (and free-thinking, progressive) magazine, The Monthly is available at several hundred spots throughout the region and now is also available on-line at www.ncmonthly.com. Published once a month since 1994, The Monthly is an independent magazine that often challenges contemporary wisdom by encouraging critical thinking about issues and attitudes in the region and beyond.

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