Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
The Ephrata Erratics Fan is one of the most remarkable depositional features of the Missoula Floods: a vast, fan-shaped spread of boulders, gravel, and sediment deposited where floodwaters burst from the mouth of the lower Grand Coulee and spread across the Quincy Basin. The fan...
The Ephrata Erratics Fan is one of the most remarkable depositional features of the Missoula Floods: a vast, fan-shaped spread of boulders, gravel, and sediment deposited where floodwaters burst from the mouth of the lower Grand Coulee and spread across the Quincy Basin. The fan contains hundreds of glacial erratics -- boulders carried from distant mountain ranges by icebergs in the floodwaters -- scattered across the landscape like a giant's marbles. Some of these erratics weigh many tons and can be traced to specific rock formations hundreds of miles away in Montana and Idaho. The fan shape is characteristic of a high-energy flow suddenly spreading and losing velocity: as the floodwaters exited the confined Grand Coulee and hit the open basin, they dropped their enormous sediment load in a spreading pattern. The resulting landscape is a treasure trove for geologists, with boulder types, sizes, and distribution patterns that reveal the floods' velocity, depth, and ice content. The Ephrata Erratics Fan makes the flood's raw power tangible: these are boulders that were carried hundreds of miles in icebergs and dumped on this prairie when the ice melted.
The Ephrata Fan is the depositional apron stretching south of the mouth of the Lower Grand Coulee, east and south of the town of Ephrata, Washington. Most of the fan is private agricultural land, but the largest erratics — including Monster Rock — sit on or near roadside parcels accessible via signed county roads and short pull-offs. No formal visitor facility; year-round.
The Ephrata Fan formed when Missoula floodwaters exploding out of the narrow Lower Grand Coulee onto the broad Quincy Basin abruptly decelerated. The hydraulic expansion dropped roughly 130 ft of sand, gravel, and boulders across a fan-shaped lobe. Sediment grades downstream from house-size erratics at the fan head (60-ft-diameter boulders) to fine gravel toward the south. The fan is one of the cleanest examples of a megaflood expansion bar and contains some of the largest ice-rafted erratics in the channeled scabland system. Monster Rock — over 25 ft tall and 60 ft across — is the headline boulder.
Mapping and granulometric work in the 2000s and 2010s by Bjornstad and others remains the standard reference. No major reinterpretation since the Balbas et al. 2017 chronology. No updates found since 2017.
Within the Lower Grand Coulee chapter's territory. The chapter has organized public field trips to Monster Rock and the fan head; no formal interpretive panel infrastructure.
Year-round; early morning low-angle light is best for photographing the larger erratics. Monster Rock is the obvious stop; the wider fan rewards a slow drive through the agricultural roads east of Ephrata.
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.