HELLO-O-O-O, I'M BACK!

Yes, it's been a very long time since I wrote and posted on this blog. What was meant to be a short hiatus while I traveled in May, became weeks and then months as I traveled again in October and then faced the task of sorting through thousands of accumulated photos (i.e. 20K+) of scenes from Turkey, France, Italy, Morocco, Germany and Iceland. How do I even start? 

When I chose the title for this blog about a year ago, my intention was to leave it broad enough to allow me to grow or expand or even bird walk from time to time about topics that interested me, with traveling and photography being at the top of my list. And so I began by posting photos along with my commentary about places I traveled and things that I saw. And unlike my Facebook travel posts in which I would post my reactions in real time, my objective for this blog was to be after-the-fact and more in depth. Sounded easy, or so I thought.

Then along about March I was enticed to join an online photo community--City Daily Photo--to begin a second blog about my own hometown, thus WallaWallaDailyPhoto.blogspot.com was born. And that has been a commitment. Posting a daily photo challenged me to see my town in new ways. I started off strong, but admittedly, 'daily' eventually became weekly with spurts of daily photos when I found a particularly interesting topic. And it did dilute my creative energy with this blog taking the biggest hit.

But like the paperwhite narcissus that stores its energy inside itself only to grow and blossom when given light, with the increasing light of this new year, I am ready to blossom again. 

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PALOUSE FALLS STATE PARK, WASHINGTON STATE

Palouse Falls is always a beautiful sight, no matter the season. But with a dusting of snow and freezing temperatures, the falls and the surrounding stark landscape is even more stunning and very worthy of an afternoon drive to see it.

The falls, a part of Washington's Palouse Falls State Park, lies on the Palouse River which is a tributary of the Snake River in southeast Washington which in turn is a tributary of the Columbia River.Thus, the Palouse River and its falls are a part of the Columbia River Basin.

On February 12, 2014, the Washington State House of Representatives passed HB 2119 unanimously to make Palouse Falls the official state waterfall in Washington State. The proposal for the bill originated when a group of elementary schools students in the nearby town of Washtucna lobbied the state legislature.

The canyon at the falls is 377 feet deep, exposing a large cross-section of the Columbia River Basalt Group. 

 The Palouse Falls and surrounding canyons were carved out during the catastrophic Missoula Floods of the previous ice age known as the Pleistocene Epoch. But early in the 20th century, this was not a given. In fact, J. Harlen Bretz sparked one of the biggest debates in geologic history when he proposed his Ice Age floods theory in 1923.

Bretz spent decades meticulously documenting evidence to support his theory that massive Ice Age floods carved the Channeled Scabland of Eastern Washington. But the geologic community only ridiculed and scorned his work, that is, until they saw the evidence themselves.

As a curious aside, on April 21, 2009, Tyler Brandt ran the falls in a kayak setting an unofficial world record for the highest waterfall run.