Steptoe Butte

The story of Steptoe Butte begins hundreds of millions of years ago, with sand that was buried, compressed into sandstone, and then cooked deep in the earth under heat and pressure into hard quartzite. Later, movements of the continent lifted that buried quartzite back toward the surface as a range of ancient hills.

Then came the basalt. Beginning millions of years ago, vast floods of lava erupted across the Northwest and spread layer upon layer over the region, drowning the old landscape. Steptoe Butte was tall enough that its summit stood above the rising lava like a stone island in a sea of molten rock, and it was never buried. That is why the butte is far, far older than the black basalt of the country around it.

That very situation, an older rock projecting up through a younger lava flow, turned out to be useful enough that geologists needed a name for it. They took the name of this hill. Today, all over the world, an isolated summit of older rock surrounded by a later lava flow is called a steptoe, a small but real gift from the Palouse to the language of earth science.

The butte carries a human name too. It is called for Colonel Edward Steptoe, whose army column was defeated by allied Plateau tribes in this region in 1858, one chapter in the long and often painful history of the Palouse country. The land itself, though, keeps a much older story than any single battle.

The reward at the top is the panorama. The summit stands roughly a thousand feet above the surrounding hills, and a road curls all the way up, so the great view is available to anyone who can drive. From the top the Palouse spreads out in a sea of rounded, cultivated hills, some of the richest dryland farming country in the world.

Those famous curves are themselves a product of the Ice Age. Windblown silt called loess piled up dozens of feet deep across the region, forming the soft, fertile soil that farmers have plowed into the flowing hills people come here to photograph. The scene shifts through the year, from emerald spring to the tawny gold of the late-summer harvest, and every season has its own beauty from the summit.

Steptoe Butte has become the classic vantage point for photographing the Palouse, especially in the low, golden light of early morning and evening, when the sun rakes across the hills and every curve casts its own long shadow. Photographers time their visits to the light and the growing season, and the summit can gather a small crowd of tripods at sunset.

The wider region rewards a slow, wandering drive. The two-lane roads thread between the hills, past grain elevators and small farm towns like Colfax, Palouse, and Pullman, home to Washington State University. It is big-sky, empty-highway country, and the butte is its natural high point in every sense.

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