For four thousand years, walls of water taller than skyscrapers tore the Pacific Northwest down to bedrock. This is the public home of the trail that follows them, built on the science of the Ice Age Floods Institute, with immersive 360° capture so you can stand inside the story from anywhere.
A wall of ice two thousand feet tall held back a lake the size of Lake Erie. When it failed, the lake emptied in two days.
The water came off the ice front moving sixty-five miles an hour, carrying icebergs the size of houses and boulders the size of cars. It scoured a quarter of Washington State to rock, dug canyons in a week, and stranded granite from Montana on hilltops in Oregon. Then the ice closed the gap, the lake refilled, and it happened again. Dozens of times.
The catastrophe ended fourteen thousand years ago. What it left is quiet, a dry coulee, a lake in a pit, a boulder in a field. Interpretation is the work of putting the water back: of standing you in the place and telling you what you’re looking at.
Every captured site carries four ways in. Walk through one and see how it works.
Open the interpretive site →What happened here and why it matters, in language anyone can follow, woven around the imagery, not buried under it.
Annotations placed inside the panorama. Touch a feature and the ground tells you what it is.
Top-down flood geometry, the full cataract, the channels, the staircase of pools. The June capture flies this.
Drag between the flood at its peak and the dry ground today. The reconstruction is the lesson.
Most signs along the trail still say 15,000 years ago, Bretz’s best guess from the 1920s, made with the only tools he had. In 2017 a team led by Andrea Balbas dated the flood boulders directly, and moved the largest floods back three thousand years.
Getting the number right is part of interpretation too. We carry the corrected science, fully attributed, onto every page.
The water crossed homelands. The peoples of this country carry their own account of it.
The floods reshaped a region that is, and has always been, the homeland of many tribal nations who live here today. A dedicated page shares those accounts in the words of tribal speakers themselves. This is only the doorway to it.
Visit Peoples of the Floods →