If you've worked as a geologist in the West, it's a fairly safe bet that J.T. Pardee visited your field area decades before you arrived. Pardee, a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, traveled as far as his little Ford Model T could take him—to hard rock mines in the Rockies, phosphate seams in Montana, fault scarps in the Basin and Range, and the desolate coulees of the Channeled Scablands. For more than 30 years, the government man journeyed along lonesome roads, trave

Steep cutbanks along West Foster Creek expose glacial deposits inset into a thick package of Miocene Ellensburg Fm. Till and haystack...

Colville River Mouth. The Colville River enters the Columbia River at Rivermile 100 just south of Kettle Falls, WA. Its an easy hike...

Palouse dust storms thicken Okanogan soils. - A silviculturist I once knew In the Okanogan Highlands of northeastern Washington, forest...

Geologists have long been fascinated with the high terrace that stands well above the modern Columbia River between Brewster and Chelan....

The Great Terrace from Chelan butte. John Whitmer photo. WGS photo archive. "I hold my conclusions lightly and am willing to change them if additional observations demand it." - I.C. Russell (1898) Central Washington's Geology is Complicated Two towering geologists of the American West, George Otis Smith and Bailey Willis , spent significant parts of their storied careers in Washington. In the introduction to their 1903 report on 'Geology and Physiography of Central Washingt