Lee Varian’s Photographs

Near the Tambopata Research Center, Peru, April 1999

Trip to Western Australia and New Zealand, October and November, 2011

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Trip to the Western U.S., June, 2011

We spent most of June, 2011, touring the U.S. Northwest, starting in Northern California and going on to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, spending much of our time in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Along the way, we visited the Sierras, the Klamath Basin, and Crater Lake.

One focus of our trip was four days spent exploring the traces left by the floods from Glacial Lake Missoula. During the last Ice Age, a glacier repeatedly dammed a stream in Montana to create a massive lake. On about two dozen occasions, the ice dam failed catastrophically, resulting in an enormous flood (ten times the volume of all the world's rivers for a week or more). These floods gouged out the Grand Coulee, deepened and widened the Columbia River, and surged into the Pacific. When the floods hit the Willamette River's entry into the Columbia, some of the water turned upstream and ripped up the Willamette Valley, rafting huge boulders trapped in ice from the dam to positions high above the current level of the Willamette. In Montana and Washington, the rushing waters left enormous braided channels, streambed "ripples" the size of football fields, and huge waterfalls (now dry) with immense plunge pools below them.

It was many years before the meaning of these formations became clear, as the scale is so great that the human mind has difficulty grasping it all. We found it fascinating to follow the still very obvious traces of the floods.

After that, we joined an outstanding Field Guides birding tour of Yellowstone and Glacier led by Terry McEneaney and his wife Karen.

One particularly grand experience from that tour was our watching a Grey Wolf swim across a lake, climb up a mountainside, and then spend an hour calling to her pack. You can see (and hear) a bit of her here.

Click to see the slideshow.