The Scablands: A scarred landscape as strange as fiction

EASTERN WASHINGTON—Traveling from the verdant, mossy coastal belt of the Pacific Northwest, one could be forgiven for feeling that the defining characteristic of Eastern Washington is its dryness. It's a land seemingly starved of rain in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. But the dry landscape known as the “Scablands” actually tells a story about excess—excess of water, water that was torrential and sudden.

The Scablands are essentially wounds, still unhealed by time and erosion. They cut through the land and down into the rock after a series of unfathomably large floods unleashed by the catastrophic draining of great glacial lakes—half the volume of Lake Michigan splashed onto the land in less than a week. If you can imagine that, you’ve got us beat. The story recorded in this landscape is so incredible, it took one geologist decades to convince his colleagues that he was reading it correctly.

Inflation of the modern American vernacular has devalued superlatives like “awesome” and “epic,” but we’re going to need them where we’re going.