The Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington are home to geologic features not found anywhere else in the world. Catastrophic floods raced through the area during the last Ice Age, carving channels through the mostly flat land. Today, rolling hills of cropland and sagebrush steppe habitat are interspersed with canyons of carved basalt columns. A completely unique world exists within those canyon walls. Creeks and lakes support grasslands and trees. Wildlife and wildflowers thrive. Remnants of early Native American settlements and pioneer homesteads speak of the first inhabitants.

The area consists of scarred black rock cut by canyons, channels, pools, rock basins, ragged buttes, and cliffs. Sagebrush is often interspersed with bluebunch wheatgrass, basin wild rye, and wildflowers. Mule deer often browse along uplands, and many migratory birds flock to the area’s lakes and wetlands. Thrushes, warblers, mountain finches, and other small birds not ordinarily found in arid, open country congregate here in fall and spring.

Prior to the 19th century, most geologists were catastrophists who believed that the earth's fossiliferous rock was the result of the Biblical global flood. Around 1850 a major shift in thinking started to take hold, and the geological discipline began to develop into what it is today. As evolutionary theory began to spread, so did the idea that the earth was very old. Geologists began to interpret features, such as flood plains and canyons, based on current rates of deposition and erosion. Uniform rates and intensities were instead proposed as being the force behind the monumental quantities of flood sediment that covers the world. Uniformitarianism still governs the minds of geologists today.

Modern geology has been largely founded upon the need by naturalists to explain our world independent of supernatural Biblical references such as the global flood. Even a suggestion that massive floods were involved with the formation of geologic features can subject a person to scorn and cause them to become ostracized by their fellow peers. An example of this attitude is illustrated by the story of Harlen Bretz, who proposed in the 1920s that the topography of eastern Washington State was the result of a massive catastrophic flood.

Harlen Bretz's named this area of eastern Washington the Channeled Scablands. The idea that sites such as the Palouse Falls Gorge pictured at left were the results of floods was thought to be outrageous, and described by some as near lunacy since the area receives very little rainfall today. It took many decades for Harlen Bretz to finally receive the credit he deserved. In fact, it was not until the area was observed from the air that many of the Scabland features were accepted as flood deposits, such as the giant ripples pictured at right, which are up to 30 feet high and 250 feet apart.

Almost fifty years following his original proposal, Bretz was hailed as a hero, and in 1979, at the age of 96, he was given geology's highest honor — the Penrose Medal, which rewards one researcher each year for exceptional contributions to geology. The Channeled Scablands have now been dedicated to Harlen Bretz, and it is commonly known that this area was destroyed by a massive flood catastrophe. The flood was caused when a large glacial lake, called lake Missoula, broke through its natural dam and destroyed the majority of eastern Washington. During the Missoula flood stratified layers and canyons were formed rapidly.

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