Potholes Coulee - Dusty Lake Trail

good morning everybody and welcome to potholes in central Washington this is a place known locally as ancient Lakes have you been here before it's a special place it's a good place to kind of just stretch your legs early in springtime it's March 16th early on a Saturday morning it's about 9:00 in the morning the light is good and uh we're going to walk towards Dusty Lake and do some thinking thanks for joining us let's get started started Ice Age floods let's go okay looking East up where I parked I'll I'll put the uh location of the small parking lot for the dusty Lake Trail head in the description below uh but for us here I think we're just going to soak in these amazing Basalt lava flows the Columbia lava sheets as um who was that as Israel Russell was calling them was that Israel Russell yeah I think so and Hiking uh from the East and dropping into potholes there's multiple options and uh this is just one and the parking lot was almost full I think mostly cuz people are interested in fishing this time of the year that's not my Jones uh but I think we can enjoy this place nonetheless just feels great to be out again my goodness what a winter not particularly hard with snow but in cold temperatures but just that Gloom those day after day of clouds and fog and don't have that this morning for sure it's time to get out here and enjoy these places and uh let me just ramble a bit here so a place like this Waits For You I'm 5 minutes away from the car not particularly challenging hiking and yet here it is public land quite lowkey and you're looking West right now the Columbia river is Down in the Hole uh so you got the so the skyline with the ridge is um up there in the ridge separate ating us from the katas valley so Ellensburg is right up and over the Ridge and in the foreground the far tan Hills are on the west side of the Columbia River we can't see the Columbia from here but the Colombia is down in the hole at the base of that sheer dark cliff and then coming closer to us from that is the floor of potholes and the lake that you're looking at is Dusty Lake one of a series of quote unquote ancient Lakes but the disappointing part of the story is those Lakes are not natural those are bodies of water from irrigation water nearby that seeped into these low spots so if you go back before the Gran dam was constructed and you look at aerial photographs from the 1930s and earlier there's no Lakes were no ancient Lakes at that time but if you know if you can handle that that doesn't bother you a whole lot I don't to me it kind of ruins it to like know that this is kind of like just puddles of water left over from farming whatever uh we can still enjoy this amazing place and full disclosure I'm doing this video in part just to enjoy being out with you but I'm also doing it as a bit of a scouting video because I think we're going to film a new episode of Nick on the Rocks here in potholes coie whether we call it potholes or ancient Lakes I'm not sure but um I'm communicating with uh very talented videographer Brady Lawrence good morning Brady um so this is the lighting condition with blue sky at 9:00 in the morning and uh plenty of opportunity to really get a good sense of this if you've been with us all winter and uh learning about the Ice Age floods and maybe you are in western Washington or Portland or something like that and you're like boy I don't know can I can I get to any of those places uh where the ice age floods did their thing and if I can do I have to stay in my car and like drive up the the guts of Gran or something like that this is you talking and he was like I I don't think I can hike very very very far well I'm 10 minutes from my car right now the only drop I did was I I parked up there on top and and it was whatever 100 ft down through uh a couple little notches but there's guard rails literally again this is the dusty Lake Trail the look in the description below you'll see a little Google Maps pin where you can park it's free and you know most of this is uh pretty lowkey I mean you know I got my hands in my pockets uh not a challenging endeavor and yet you can get a real clear feel for the scale now this is one of two coolies so this potholes area is a if you take the time to look on Google Maps you'll see that there's two coolies and a is just a big Ice Age floods carved Canyon there's no River in the Floor of this thing and that Ridge over there is tall but it's narrow so there's this and then if you get up and over that Basalt rib out in the middle there's an equally big on the other side collectively they're known as potholes kind of dumb name I think I would call it twin coolies or something a little bit more descriptive for the fact that these things are formed in tandem but not up to me I miss that meeting fresh air white pasty skin uh I guess I got off the trail here did I I must have too busy talking to you guys let me find the trail oh no it's here it's just a little so this is so what I've done so far is super straightforward and and now it's a bit more of a scramble this might be a deal breaker for some of you but I'm just trying to think about people who uh have been enjoying learning about these places want to do a short hike that's not uh terribly intimidating and I would put this one right up there but yeah this this stretch here is probably not for everybody breaking a sweat already love it you got to love it maybe your person is like oh I don't know that that looks like snake country to me I I am definitely afraid of snakes is that you talking right now well my my good buddy Adrien Slade I don't know if you've seen a couple videos I've done with her about rattlesnakes too early for rattlesnakes if you want to see this country and you're yet very afraid of snakes this is rattlesnake habitat for sure but safe to say that you have no concerns about snakes in mid-march they are hibernating or whatever the right term is they're in their dens so come on out and it doesn't seem to appease people's fears but I've lost track of how many people bring up rattles snakes when they talk to me about hiking in this country in July and August and September I'm like just never really had a problem it's just not a problem you hear a rattle you stop you you back back up a little bit give them space they're not interested in dealing with you that's the end of the story and that snake video I did with Adrian last spring I had total trust in her like almost irrational amounts of trust cuz we were walking around on a den with hundreds of snakes and yet I was with her and I just I just knew was in good hands okay I don't know if I'm going to go much well I don't know let's so now I've got a looks like I need to well let's try over here a common experience out here is dealing with even if there is a bit of a trail uh there's a few spots where kind of getting down on all fours or at least three is needed and that's where a few longer legs help out but I'm I'm not exactly young anymore so I have to be a little bit extra careful about locomoting out here perhaps you can relate so I'm willing to bet I don't even know about fishing season is it fishing season right now it sure seems like it is willing to bet we're going to see a few folks fishing on the shore here maybe I'll just but it's Dead Calm out here no vehicles and I mean Interstate night is 10 Mi away so this is a nice spot to experience Solitude and you're like yeah how about you just shut up and let me enjoy this place okay can do yeah looks like there's a faint Trail through the Talis there but I don't think I'm going to get much better view not sure I need to go over there this necessarily although maybe I want to go up on that rib yeah it's nicely lit from the East here bald eagle can't promise there's going to be a bald eagle when you come test my video graphy skills here oh boy so do you have this book in your library on the trail of the Ice Age floods by Bruce bornstead to me this is still the go-to for easy access places to hike and drive to appreciate the ice age floods so let me skip to a page that I used this morning cuz it's been a few years since I've been in this spot come on Bruce this book is almost 20 years old wow time flies all right so here's a map and you can see Dusty Lake Trail leading to Dusty Lake that's where we are so I parked at that capital letter T which is the trail head and took me 20 minutes with a couple of minor scrambles to get to this view Dusty Lake sitting in potholes cooly but you can see that there's can you you can maybe see that there's a Basalt rib and Bruce is actually planted at least 20 years ago put a geocache uh on a selected spot on that Basalt rib and so hopefully you can see that there's potholes is really two separate coolies East West and ancient Lake which is not the southern coie but the one across the way so again that's the basalt rib right there if you hop over Basalt rib get your geocache leave your little treasure pick up a little treasure from the Geocache thanks Bruce then you can hop down to a bigger series of lakes ancient Lakes let's read a little bit if possible with the lighting conditions just right to read out of Bruce's book Dusty Lake Trail drops quickly Into the Heart of the South Al Cove of potholes at Dusty Lake provides the shortest access into the coie because of several steep sections the trail is recommended for hikers only you can get up to a two mile round trip if you like driving directions is before Google Maps and everything upper cat upper catara yeah there's a handrail I was surprised by that and and Bruce calls it right irrigation water yeah there are some uh impressive flood deposits so before we leave this spot let me just kind of narrate for you in case you're not quite sure of the basics of the Ice Age floods that are here so before the Ice Age 2.6 million years ago none of this opening was here and again you know there's a twin one on the other side of that rib okay fine so these Basalt layers were intact there was no disconnect between that side and that side there wasn't even a a river valley here there in fact there was a beautiful Ridge a North South Ridge coming right through here I mean the G Amphitheater if you've been to a music show at the Gorge uh is you know like 3 miles that way to the South again you're looking West so 2 and a half million years ago there was no Valley here at all this was in fact a beautiful Ridge I don't know how beautiful it was but it was an intact Ridge God there's that bald eagle again and the idea is this is not a pre Valley that was carved out by flood water that is the story with Moses or the lower Grand coie but here instead this is a ridge that was totally blown out blown out by Ice Age flood water so why would the flood water come through here why would it just remove this whole ridge in such a dramatic case well it's hard to do that verbally but I'll try behind us is a broad open Basin called the Quincy Basin think of it like a kitty pool out in your front lawn and you got the garden hose starting to fill the kitty pool so the garden hose uh was the Grand and there was Major Ice Age flood water coming over dry falls down through lower Grand getting to Soap Lake getting to what's known as the afraid of fan dropping a bunch of rocks but that garden hose just fills the kitty pool fill s the Quincy Basin that's behind us but we quickly fill the kitty pool to such an extreme that there's too much water for the kitty pool and there's a few places around the rim of the plastic edge of the kitty pool that are going to start to give way this is one of those spots where the water started leaking over the top and it's common for people to talk about visualize a waterfall where the water from Quincy Basin behind you is cascading down into the Columbia River Down in the Hole there well that's fine but as Vic baker said recently in a live stream no it was a recorded Zoom interview with Sky as Vic baker said this is Vic talking I've done the hydraulics on this you couldn't if you were in a helicopter looking at this Ice Age flooding leaking over and destroying this Ridge you wouldn't even see the waterfall because there was a couple hundred feet of water up in the sky that was surging from the Quincy basement getting excited now water leaking from the Quincy Basin bathtub behind you and dropping into the Columbia Gorge was so deep that you couldn't even have seen a waterfall so I mean yeah are we sitting in are we looking at a plunge pool is this a place where there was an Ice Age waterfall yeah that's the most conven I way to describe it because we can relate to what a waterfall is we've seen waterfalls but as Vic and others have pointed out there was so much water leaking over that you're destroying the edge of the kidy pool you're destroying the Ridge and yet if you're looking down on when that flood of water was leaking from the Quincy Basin to the Columbia river valley floor you would have seen white water but you wouldn't have seen the big drop it was all under the water it's like think of the Thunder think of the sounds of that and then yeah once you get that waterfall starting to you know what I mean by waterfall quote unquote once you get that waterfall to start chewing away at this balt material then you Retreat then you take the rim of that waterfall quote unquote and it starts to migrate East and as you migrate the waterfall East chew more chew more chew more chew more it all gets sent down to Colombia you're left with this potholes cooly seen this deepest part which was totally without Lake water until the 20th century this deepest part mark where the Thundering quote unquote waterfall was doing its thing and so yes this is the old lip of the waterfall but you're hearing me I think that it was more than just a simple waterfall visual now what I'm interested in is when exactly did that happen if you've been with me all winter you know that I'm starting to have doubts about whether that major Ice Age flooding the biggest of the stories was younger than 30,000 years ago yeah even in a place like this I'm wondering if the older bigger story is far older than 30,000 years ago class dismissed about 9:45 a.m. that's one lava flow bottom half beautiful colonade 16 million years ago red hot liquid the columns formed at the base first and then crackled their way up towards the interior of the flow and then those columns stop and we get into this weird swirly chaotically fractured inature which remains a mystery nobody knows how to interpret that interior chaotic fracture scene the Columbia lava sheets Israel Russell Canyon Ren hope you can hear that my favorite sound out here lava and water thank you everybody I love you and goodbye from potholes in central Washington but wait there's more I can't stop obviously this is a spot and the light is precisely wrong now you're looking Southeast back towards Dusty so at the beginning of the video I was on the other side looking this way but I'm up here in this cute little saddle in that Basalt rib that's sitting precisely in the middle of potholes and I just visited with some folks who watch a bunch of the videos and that was fun and besides them even though it's a very busy morning at the trail head you can easily get pretty Lonesome all by yourself Solitude and everything else so if I can get Brady out here sometime this spring maybe this is a spot where we can get a sense of the twin right so you're looking North the north part of pothole is the blade is behind me this thin basaltic rib but as we Zoom work our way back to the South there's Dusty looking into the sun okay I think I need to flip you around I feel I I I think I want to share this with you so maybe I can just finish this video finally with you to just tell you a quick story at the end of the last segment at the other spot I turned the camera off put it in my pocket threw everything in my pack walk back to the car and as I was approaching the car there were quite a few people at the at the lot 10:00 on a Saturday morning everybody's got spring fever they're all out here and somebody asked me if there was a spot to park up aad had and I said oh yeah just just swing around and he's like hey Nick zentner and I said yes sir said we talked for about five minutes he'd been watching all the videos and it's a common thing there's a reason I'm telling you this story it's a common thing that people recognize my voice they don't really recognize me but that voice they're just the head's just turn like I know that voice so as I'm talking to this one guy then the person just about ready ready to start hiking also says hey it's my turn to chat with you for a while and then a father of three teenage daughters and then a cowboy and then a hippie gal and they're all respectful at all each of those encounters are about five minutes I enjoy it handshake maybe even post for a photo or two with the girls or something like that that's fine but you know what my favorite part is I'm on my way I throw my pack in the car turn the car on start heading out back onto the gravel road I just look in my rear view mirror and they're all talking to each other and I don't think there'd be any other reason that they would talk to each other but they have a connection they have something in common so one of the guys said I I just was down at Emerald Road and I was collecting all these River stones that you made that video about a couple years ago so he's on his hands and knees with his bucket full of Columbia River courts sites blonde courtz sites golden courts sites and he was giving them to the teenage girls and the Mexican ameran family and I mean that's my favorite part of this whole thing thank you goodbye

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 30,397

Keywords: Nick Zentner, Potholes Coulee, Ancient Lakes, Dusty Lake

Id: LZGCc_55Dn4

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024