Washington Trails Association
- Bobs Lakes (wta.org)
Lakes in the Potholes region come and go as the water table rises and falls. âBobs Lakesâ refers to a string of shallow ponds aligned in one of the channels of the Channeled Scabland region of Eastern Washington. Most of these ponds are now dry, but that doesnât detract from the areaâs natural beauty.
- Cache Crater Overlook (wta.org)
Near Odessa Craters is this short, flat trail to another crater, this one terminating at an overlook.
- Odessa Craters (wta.org)
The Craters trail encompasses several different craters, and in spring, flora blooms clear skies make the whole area delightful. If you embark on a counter-clockwise route, there’s a short uphill jaunt, but either direction offers hikers a nice hour-long walk if stopping to take photos.
- Channeled Scablands (Wikipedia)
The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of Washington state. The Channeled Scablands were scoured by more than 40 cataclysmic floods during the Last Glacial Maximum and innumerable older cataclysmic floods over the last two million years. These floods were periodically unleashed whenever a large glacial lake broke through its ice dam and swept across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. The last of the cataclysmic floods occurred between 18,200 and 14,000 years ago.
