Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
The exact nature of the evidence at the Sanpoil Valley locality is not made clear by Pardee. Perhaps the contrast between ice abraded lower slopes of Mt. Chilimas, in secs. 4 and 5, T.31N., R.33E. (placename location), and the little-abraded or non-abraded upper slopes, which,...
The exact nature of the evidence at the Sanpoil Valley locality is not made clear by Pardee. Perhaps the contrast between ice abraded lower slopes of Mt. Chilimas, in secs. 4 and 5, T.31N., R.33E. (placename location), and the little-abraded or non-abraded upper slopes, which, nevertheless, carry a few erratics, was meant. If so, the contrast does not, in the writer’s opinion, constitute evidence for or against two distinct glacial stages. Flint 1937 Drift Paper— Flint 1937
This is one of more than 1,800 field sites cataloged in the early scabland surveys — the bedrock of the Ice Age Floods scientific record. The Bretz-era researchers walked the ground first; modern cosmogenic dating, LiDAR, and remote sensing have since extended and refined what they mapped.
Active: 1925-1976 (Spokane-region glacial mapping 1935-1938) Affiliation: Yale University (faculty 1925-1976, full professor 1945) Key paper: Flint, R.F. (1938). "Origin of the Cheney-Palouse Scabland Tract." Geological Society of America Bulletin 49(3): 461-524.
Flint conducted three field seasons of glacial mapping in the Spokane region beginning in 1935 and was, for the first two decades after Bretz's 1923 paper, the most prominent skeptic of catastrophic flooding. His 1938 paper argued the scablands were cut by ordinary glacial meltwater operating over long durations, an interpretation that delayed acceptance of Bretz's hypothesis until Pardee's 1942 paper made the catastrophic source unavoidable. Flint's larger contribution to flood-corridor geology was methodological: his 1947 textbook Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (and its 1957 and 1971 revisions) became the standard reference that defined how the Cordilleran Ice Sheet's southern margin, ice-dam configurations, and lobate retreat were mapped across the Pacific Northwest. He helped establish the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and brought radiocarbon dating into glacial stratigraphy. He died of a stroke in 1976.
Source: Richard Foster Flint - Wikipedia; GSA Memorial, Stephen Porter
Every site along the trail will receive the full Terrain360 capture treatment: ground-level 360° panoramas, drone aerial imagery, and photogrammetry-based 3D models that visitors can spin in their browser. This page reserves the slots; the imagery flows in as field capture completes.
Ground-level 360° panorama, every step along the feature, captured by Terrain360 field crews.
Drone flyovers reveal the geometry of catastrophe — ripple marks, gravel bars, and scour patterns invisible from the ground.
Photogrammetry and Gaussian-splat models let visitors rotate, measure, and inspect features in detail-page WebGL viewers.
These till deposits help define the maximum extent of Cordilleran Ice Sheet lobes into the Columbia Plateau. Modern dating techniques have refined the timing of ice advances, showing they correlate with periods when flooding would have been blocked by ice, adding complexity to the flood chronology.