Petroglyphs of the Wanapum, a Native American tribe that once lived in small villages all along the Columbia River, from Priest Rapids to the Snake River. Beginning in the 19th century, contact with settlers and missionaries proved disastrous for the Wanapum tribe.

The Wanapum people never fought white settlers, though they also resisted signing any treaty agreements, which left them no federally-recognized land rights. A smallpox outbreak in 1870 left only 300 members of the tribe alive, and their numbers had dwindled to less than 50 by the 1940s, when major dams on the river flooded their former fishing grounds even as one thousand square miles of their land were taken to build the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and a U.S. Army training facility.

The Wanapum petroglyphs were blasted from basalt cliffs along Priest Rapids during dam construction in 1963 and moved to the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park/Wanapum Recreational Area just north of Vantage, Washington.

My son at the edge of Dry Falls, at the head of the Lower Grand Coulee in Eastern Washington this morning. Between fifteen and thirteen thousand years ago, glacial lake waters periodically spilled across ice dams at the south end of the Okanagan Lobe of the Cordellerian Ice Sheet and carved gigantic channels across the central part of Washington State. Water hundreds of feet deep roared over these 400 foot high cliffs, ten times the current flow of all the world’s rivers, and over a two thousand year period created what geologists call the largest known waterfall to have ever existed.