May, 2022
Nope, we didn’t see any red hot lava on this trip, but we sure saw lots of lava rocks and lava columns that were super red hot millions of years ago. Red hot lava pouring up through the earth and covering the earth.
A different friend of mine (not the friend I was camping with on this trip) taught me about basalt (lava) columns just 3 or 4 years ago. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by them, and I see them all sorts of places where I hadn’t noticed them before. But here, in the Potholes area, lava columns are everywhere! And there are at least three different types (or shapes), or maybe they are older and newer, or they cooled differently, etc. They’re fascinating.
Let me start with a few photos that my camping friend and I took on this camping trip, and then I’ll post some videos that I found online that do a whole lot better job of describing all of this to you than I can. So … here are a few photos of lava columns from our trip … out of hundreds of photos taken over the five days we were here. These columns are everywhere!
And these columns and rocks are tens of thousands, and sometimes millions, of years old.
How many faces do you see in the lava rock in the photo above? I see eight. One of those faces is an elephant, and another is a puma or a cougar.
While driving along the South Morgan Lake Road, we spotted these lava tubes by the side of the road. They were obviously set up as an educational exhibit. We pulled into the parking lot on the right, and walked across the road to check this out.
Turns out these lava tubes had been found on private property, someone’s home, where they were being used to build a deck. In 1999, these tubes were removed from that property and brought back here. The tubes had been taken illegally from a lava tube wall to use at a private home. They were brought here and positioned next to each other as they had been at the wall, so it would be easy for lots of folks to see them up close.
The tubes are 16-18 feet tall. It’s hard to tell how tall something is when you’re only 5’8″ tall. The diameter of the ones on the ground was about 1.5 to 2 feet. They are a lot larger and taller than they look in these photos. Solid lava. 15 million years old.
It’s hard to imagine, but I try to think about lava that would cover hundreds and thousands of miles of land … and cover the land so the lava was many miles deep too. What a thing that would have been to see.
The photo below is of red hot lava flowing on the island of Hawaii. I don’t know the size of the flow in the photo below, but I do know I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it.
The photo above was used on a sign at this lava tube exhibit simply to show how lava flows. But the sign also says that the lava here in Potholes took only two weeks to reach the Pacific Ocean … about 420 miles away via what would become the Columbia River. So … two weeks and 420 miles. That’s 210 miles/week, or 30 miles/day, or 6,600 feet/hour, or about 2 feet per second … on the average. But then consider that a flow of lava stops and starts, stops and starts, over and over … so when the lava WAS flowing, it might have been moving at 5 or 6 feet per second. And that’s not even counting the WIDTH of this lava flow, and the number of lava flows here over millennium. Makes my brain melt.
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Now for the videos. There are lots of videos online about the Potholes area here in Washington. Here are three of my favorites that talk about the lava.
In the video below, look in the background for the lava tubes all over this area. At time mark 6:58, look at those huge lava tubes! The video below is almost 30 minutes long so if you don’t want to watch a video that long, then that’s ok. But it’s a great video. I’m thinking that probably every piece of rock here is lava rock, whether in tubes or weathered away into smaller chunks. 15 millions years can do that, yes!
Amazing. I didn’t have a clue about this stuff before this trip. I thought we would be seeing migrating birds and other wonderful wildlife things like that … and we did … birds are coming up in the next blog post. But I was amazed by the geology here and will absolutely return to spend more time exploring this land that is millions of years old.