Lower Crab Creek Coulee - Buttes, Mesas and tsmee-toos?

This early March hike took me by two clusters of buttes and mesas in the Lower Crab Creek Coulee.

Several of these mesas may have been used as defensive positions by early Columbia Plateau residents. Mesas occupied by Native Americans were known as tsmee-toos by the Sinkiuse. The Lower Crab Creek Coulee features shown were shaped by Ice Age Floodwaters and the Columbia River.

Columbia Basin Wildlife Area
Lower Crab Creek Unit

Click any image to enlarge


In 1973 amateur archaeologist Nat Washington released a report titled "Mesa Top Cliff Dwellers of Eastern Washington". Washington found evidence that Native Americans occupied the tops of at least 55 mesas in the Columbia Basin at some period. The sheer basalt walls are thought to have provided protection during attacts.
Ladders may have been used to gain access to the mesa top and would have been pulled up once the group was in position.


Native Americans living in the Columbia Basin have used the lower Crab Creek drainage as a travel route for thousands of years.


The Saddle Mountains rise sharply and form the coulee's south rim.


Huge basalt boulders scattered below the coulee's north rim.


View from north rim, looking east up the massive coulee.






View from north rim of coulee.


Wahatis Peak in the distance.


This butte is surrounded by red-winged blackbird habitat. March is a great time to view birds in Lower Crab Creek Coulee.


Aerial view of organic fields on the Smyrna Bench. Arrows mark Lower Crab Creek Coulee. The mesas and buttes shown above are marked by the last two arrows.


If you slow down to study any one image in this post ... I hope it's this one.

Geologist/Author Bruce Bjornstad created this map showing the path of the Columbia River when the Okanogan Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was in place. Bruce has marked Lower Crab Creek Coulee with the number 38. It was a combination of the Ice Age Floods and this Columbia River diversion that shaped Lower Crab Creek Coulee.

If you have a few minutes --- Click the map below to enlarge and follow the Columbia River's course shown on Bruce's map in Google's terrain view. The old river channel is easy to trace through the Drumheller Channels, Moses Lake area (Big Bend) and up through Rocky Ford to the Lower Grand Coulee.


This shot looking NE to the upper coulee, was taken several years ago from the Smyrna Bench.


It sure is neat to see the work done by the floods scrubbing away basalt. Where remnants of the upper basalt flow remain in the form of buttes and mesas, it's interesting to note well-defined moats sometimes present on the upstream side.


Interesting balanced rock in the distance.


Should have ended up with a better shot of the rock. Saw no hope of getting on top of the rock before my 20 second camera delay expired.


One of two sharp summit basalt formations in the area.


Local deer seem nervous.


Red-tailed hawk soars above the north coulee wall.


Looking SW into the west end of the huge coulee. Try to imagine the dust stirred up in 1906 when 5,000 wild horses were rounded up between the Saddle Mountains and Ephrata. Newspaper reporters from as far away as the Boston Herald were sent to cover the event known as the Last Grand Roundup.


The Lower Crab Creek area was important to early ranchers that raised cattle and sheep. This display of equipment used by these men is located in the Wanapum Heritage Center a few miles up the Columbia River from the mouth of Crab Creek Coulee.
Wanapum Heritage Center


Lower Crab Creek Coulee could one day be used to store irrigation water. USGS image above (note Columbia River at left).

The Bureau of Reclamation and Washington State Department of Ecology are exploring several coulees created by the Ice Age Floods for additional off-channel storage of Columbia River water. Lower Crab Creek Coulee is high on their list with a potential active storage capacity of 2,300,000 acre-feet. Columbia River Basin Storage Options

Link to: Columbia River Mainstem Storage Options, Washington Off-Channel Storage Assessment Pre-Appraisal Report (Large File 7.4 MB pdf)


With transmission lines already in place and a reliable wind on the Saddle Mountain crest, the ridge looks like a windfarm waiting to happen.


This photo was taken pretty close to the point that I turned to the north and climbed up on Dry Island.


Marsh area near the Clementine Lake trailhead.


Plenty of room to roam on the refuge. This hike was just over 20 miles.

The next two images are from the Drumheller Channels north of Othello.


Deadman's Bluff
Over the years, buttes and mesas created by the Ice Age Floods were put to other uses. This large mesa along the Morgan Lake road in the Drumheller Channels has a gentle slope on the south end (this view from north).

The mesa was once used by local cattlemen as a sort of a "Corral in the sky" for their herd. The cattle were driven up the south side and one or two men were all that was needed to keep them on top. One April night in 1880, 15-year-old Edward O'Rourke was assigned the job of keeping the herd on the mesa. At some point during the night, Edward and his mule tumbled off the east side to their deaths. A rock-pile marker visible from the road marks the point of impact.

The mesa is known today as Deadman's Bluff and the nearby lake used to clean Edward up before he was returned to his parents is Deadman Lake. (Lake located just SW of the Morgan Lake - McManamon intersection)

Former Land Manager of the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge Ron Anglin has written an excellent book on central Washington history that includes descriptions of the Last Grand Roundup, tsmee-toos, and O'Rourke's tumble off the mesa. Forgotten Trails


Washington found that one of the characteristics of mesas used as defensive positions was a reliable nearby source of water. I need to catch up with Washington's report to see if this Drumheller Channel mesa along Crab Creek made the list of 55.


Click to open WDFW's: Lower Crab Creek Unit - Detailed Land Ownership & Resource Map

Eagle perched above Columbia River near Wanapum Dam.


View Larger Map
Note tiny Crab Creek wandering through the massive Lower Crab Creek Coulee. Use your mouse to navigate map.

Links to Lower Crab Creek trip reports posted by others:

Crab Creek Wildlife Area Hike

Seattle P-I Hike of the Week

Spring Coulee (East Rim)

- Click any image to expand -

Looking northwest to Billy Clapp Lake from road.Farming operation above trimline - top left.


No violations today ... I was unarmed and alone.

Last month I posted a few photos and text after a hike down the west side of Billy Clapp Lake.

See: Billy Clapp (West Side)
As I walked the west side in October, I was looking through binoculars at some of the flood features above the east shore and decided that I'd need to get a closer look. Saturday I noticed that Accuweather had a sunball symbol on Sunday ... So off I went (I wish I'd have looked at the numbers they had next to the sunball). When I started hiking it was 18 degrees ... Gloves and a warmer coat would have been nice.

The approach I took is described by State Fish & Wildlife as: "A primitive parking area on the east side of the Billy Clapp Reservoir that is about two miles from the west end of county Road 26 NE off of county Road Q NE."


No shortage of deer between Wilson Creek and Billy Clapp Lake.

I was surprised at the number of deer, ducks and geese I saw during my hike. The State doesn't seem to think much of the area as a refuge. Paragraph below from Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife site. The two-page ownership map it provides is pretty good. - See link below.

Billy Clapp area ownership map
Columbia Basin Wildlife Area

The Billy Clapp Lake unit is 4,000 acres along what was originally called Long Lake Reservoir but renamed in honor of one of the originators of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. The natural coulee was dammed on the lower south end (Pinto Dam) to create the reservoir. Water cascades into the upper end of the reservoir from the Main Canal creating Summer Falls. Basalt cliffs of varying heights encompass the reservoir. Most of the shoreline is too steep and rocky to support wetland or riparian vegetation, and the uplands are a mix of poor quality gravelly soils and basalt outcroppings. Vegetation varies from the fire-caused cheatgrass or bunchgrass communities to native woody shrubs on talus slopes. BOR maintains public parking, and boat launching is available on the north end of the lake. The Stratford Game Reserve encompasses nearly all the public land in this unit. Originally designated to provide a resting area for migrating waterfowl each fall, public use and changing migration patterns have made the Game Reserve less effective.

From the Grand Coulee

THREE ICE AGE FLOOD CHANNELS

Not all of the Grand Coulee flow entered the Quincy Basin via Lower Grand Coulee. Water that escaped the Grand Coulee cut channels around High Hill and Pinto Ridge. These channels carried substantial flows and became known as Dry Coulee and Spring Coulee (The reservoir created in Spring Coulee is today named Billy Clapp Lake). Floodwaters flowing through Spring Coulee fed into the Crab Creek channel prior to entering the Quincy Basin.

As stated in the October post - J Harlen Bretz called Spring Coulee:

"A fine scabland canyon with castle-like buttes, lateral subsidiary canyons, and cataracts notching its walls"


Bureau of Reclamation Benchmark.

Between 1946 and 1948 the Bureau of Reclamation constructed Pinto Dam at the south end of Spring Coulee. The Coulee is one of many Ice Age Flood features used by the Bureau as part of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project.

Surveyed by the USBOR 10 years prior to Pinto Dam construction.

It was pretty cool to take a few minutes and think about the surveyors walking the Ice Age Floods region in the 1930s. In his book "Grand Coulee Harnessing a Dream"- Paul C. Pitzer describes the surveyors searching the channeled scablands of eastern Washington for potential storage reservoirs, dam sites and canal routes.

Benchmark - GPS
N 47°28.910'
W 119°14.530'

The features I was most interested in on this side of the coulee were several potholes and a group of "Drumheller" type channels just east of the potholes.

The potholes were formed during the Glacial Lake Missoula flood events that swept over eastern Washington as recently as 15,000 years ago. Powerful whirlpools (sometimes referred to as underwater tornados) known as kolks, scoured out these holes.

WIKIPEDIA DEFINES KOLK: (also known as colc) is an underwater vortex that is created when rapidly rushing water passes an underwater obstacle in boundary areas of high shear. High velocity gradients produce a violently rotating column of water, similar to a tornado. Kolks are capable of plucking multi-ton blocks of rock and transporting them in suspension for some thousands of meters.

In his book "On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods", Geologist Bruce Bjornstad explains the creation of Rock Basins and Potholes: "Fast-moving floodwaters passing through scabland channels further gouged into the basalt, scouring out rock basins and augering deep holes into basalt. Like a powerful vacuum cleaner, floodwaters actually sucked up all the loose material off the land surface, including huge columns of basalt, taking advantage of any weakness in the rock, such as fractures."


Google Earth image with pothole ID numbers I'll use below.

To view image of pothole #4, you'll need to open the October post and scroll down to the pothole image.

Remember ... You can click image to enlarge.


Pothole ID #1

The picture doesn't do this pothole justice. This is one fine pothole! I'll return in the spring and try to get a better shot as the scale just doesn't show here.

Pothole ID #2

Pothole ID #3

During our lunch stop on the October trip, we noticed a "hanging pothole" on the other side of the coulee. Erosion of the main channel has opened up one side of the pothole. Future megafloods will finish the job and remove all traces of this pothole before going after potholes #1 and #2.

Many shallow potholes are found in this area.

These smaller kolk carved basins seem popular with the local wildlife. Game trails lead to each of them.

I'll embed a Google Map at the bottom of this post. If you switch the map from Terrain (TER) to Satellite (SAT) and zoom in, you'll be able to search the area and find many more potholes on the bench east of Billy Clapp Lake.


Several nice mesas near the lake.


A smaller version of "Hat Rock".


Hard to hide with those pointy things sticking out of your head.


Google Earth image shows Giant Current Ripples above Billy Clapp Lake


For scale you can open the October post where I posted an image of Bruce Bjornstad standing on one of the ripples shown in this shot. The mix of farmland, ripples and a massive flood channel remind me of a similar spot closer to home ... see photos below.



Giant Current Ripples in Washtucna Coulee -
Note farmer on tractor at top left.


Same shot but a little wider angle. Huge flood bar being removed at coulee floor. If you look to the right of the quarry there seems to be one ripple mark left.

Another set of Washtucna Coulee giant current ripples


Borrow pit in ripple-covered flood bar exposes layer of windblown loess deposited since the Ice Age Floods.




South of the coulee along Highway 28 a historical marker gives a brief history of the area:

HISTORY OF THE STRATFORD AREA
Indians camped along Crab Creek in Stratford to gather roots and other food. The main Indian trail came past Stratford across the creek. The Indian trail branched here & one went past Pinto Dam. LT Symons came past here while laying out military wagon road from FT Walla Walla to Camp Chelan in 1879. Old wagon road from Waterville to Ritzville came past here in 1888. Railroad built in 1892. Early apple orchards were irrigated from Brook Lake in late 1890's. Pumphouse still standing. Stratford platted in 1903. Crab Lake drained by local pioneers in 1909 for farming purposes.
Grant County Historical Society