White-throated swifts, just home from wintering in the tropics, sliced the air around the yawning plunge bowl where Palouse Falls drops 185 feet. Sea Lion guests looked on from rimside vantage points into a canyon torn from the landscape by Ice Age flood torrents. The floods swept south across eastern Washington State when an ice lobe dam repeatedly broke after impounding water to a 4,000 foot depth near the Canadian border.
This geologic and scenic spectacle is in remote and little known Palouse Falls State Park, where the resident marmots recently came out of hibernation. They basked in the sun and studied us. Updrafts carried the misty spray of plunging water upward along the dark cliff into a shimmer of dancing gold light.
Pairs of swifts coupled high over the canyon, twirled downward in an ecstatic mating spiral and broke free just above the Palouse River.
Paul Kane, a Canadian artist who traveled with the Hudson Bay Company fur brigades, first illustrated Palouse Falls in 1847, and this writer brought a Kane print from the Royal Museum of Canada to share at recap with our guests.
