Bus Tours with Ken Lacy: Grand Coulee Ice

Join Ken Lacy on a tour of the Moses Coulee and Waterville Plateau on Saturday, Oct. 21.

Prior to the tour, between 8:30-9 AM, Lacy will provide a brief lecture in the Performance Hall of the museum before departure. Attendees will be picked up at the museum at 9 AM, and dropped off at the YMCA parking lot at 5 PM, where attendees will need to park their vehicles. Parking at the museum will be designated for those attending the Haunted Museum.

Over the course of this field trip, attendees will learn details about the basalt and the floodwaters, examining how these floodwaters eroded the 50-mile-long Grand Coulee in only 300 flood days.  For comparison, it took over 5 million years to carve the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

Attendees will examine evidence of the different basalt flows, shown in the walls of Moses Coulee. At the Waterville Plateau, guests will see a field where Native Americans harvested their animals.

Near Withrow, guests will see the terminal moraine of the continental ice sheet. The glacier’s forward progress was stalled here, allowing the glacier to dump hundreds of feet of sediment off the front of the glacier.

Later on, Lacy will showcase glacial landforms including kames, drumlins, eskers and kettles.

Tour-goers will then enter the mouth of the Okanogan Valley to see evidence of the erosive power of the ice sheet, an area that was frequented by the actress Jodie Foster. Afterwards, Lacy will highlight the Grand Terrace, near Brewster.

Finally, guests will look at the volcanic dikes located in Pine Canyon, following the Columbia River back to Wenatchee.

Tickets are $90 for members and $125 for non-members. Registration is required and can be found here.