Palouse Falls State Park

At the end of the last Ice Age, a lobe of glacial ice repeatedly dammed a river in what is now Idaho, backing up an enormous body of water called Glacial Lake Missoula. Again and again the ice dam failed, releasing walls of water that swept across eastern Washington in floods of almost unimaginable scale, scouring the soil down to bare basalt and gouging out the maze of dry canyons known as the Channeled Scablands.

Palouse Falls is one of the most dramatic scars those floods left. The floodwaters carved the deep basalt canyon and the plunge amphitheater, rerouting the Palouse River over a new lip of rock. Of all the waterfalls the floods created across the scablands, this is the one that still flows year round, a living remnant of a catastrophe that reshaped the Northwest thousands of years ago.

The falls drop 198 feet into a churning pool ringed by sheer columns of dark basalt, the cooled remains of ancient lava flows that the floods later cut through. Below the plunge the river winds on through a steep, narrow canyon toward its meeting with the Snake River, and the whole scene has the raw, unfinished look of a landscape recently rearranged.

The Palouse people, who lived in this country long before it was a park, knew the falls by their own name, remembered in some sources as Aput Aput, meaning falling water. Their long presence is part of the place, and the falls remain a striking natural landmark on what was once a well-traveled Native route.

The falls change hard with the seasons. In spring, snowmelt swells the Palouse River and the falls thunder at their fullest; by late summer the flow thins and the canyon bakes. Winter can bring ice and bitter wind. Each season has its own mood, from green spring canyons to golden autumn light on the basalt.

The developed overlooks give safe, spectacular views, and it is important to keep to them. The informal boot paths that scramble to the very brink and down to the base are steep, crumbling, and genuinely dangerous, and people have been badly hurt or killed venturing off the marked areas. The view from behind the railings is the great one anyway.

Palouse Falls sits at the edge of two of eastern Washington's signature landscapes. To the north and east rise the rolling, cultivated hills of the Palouse, some of the richest dryland wheat country in the world, their curves catching the light at sunrise and sunset. To the west and south spreads the harder, stranger scabland the floods left bare.

That contrast makes for a memorable drive. The roads out to the falls thread between wheat fields and coulees, and the whole region rewards travelers who like big skies, empty highways, and geology written large across the land.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.