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Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
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1
WELTER AND WASTE
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and a powerful wind hovering over the waters, and God said, Let there be light,
and there was light…[and] dry land and seas and plants and trees which grew fruit with seed.
—Book of Genesis
The highly diverse geology of Washington State is proof there was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and a powerful wind was hovering over the waters.
This state, located in the Northwest, has been the stage for intrusions of igneous and metamorphic rocks, volcanic activity, mountain-building episodes, erosion and massive flooding events. Today, the wind still hovers over the majestic waters of the Columbia River just above Wallula Gap in Walla Walla County in the southeastern part of the state.
Throughout the dry land of the state, there are indeed trees growing fruit with seed,
the same forbidden fruit with origins in the Garden of Eden, and today producing over 60 percent of the nation’s apples. In the Book of Genesis a patriarch named Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first man to have planted a vineyard bearing clusters of fruit with seed.
Vineyards were also planted in the state of Washington as early as 1825 and have been planted since, with over forty-four thousand acres as of 2011.
Over ten million years ago, a vast area that is now known as the Columbia Basin, located in eastern Washington, was engulfed with one of the largest basaltic lava floods ever to appear on the earth, covering sixty-three thousand square miles of the Pacific Northwest. The hot and angry lava flowed, reaching a thickness of more than twelve thousand feet. The molten rock erupted as the crust of the earth subsided, creating a broad, depressed lava plain.
Most of the flows were extruded near the southeast corner of the state east of Walla Walla County. Many of these fluid trails of lava traveled as far as the Pacific Ocean, guided by the ancestral Columbia River drainage. The hardened lava flows were eventually sculpted by erosion, stones were deposited, lakebeds and natural dams were formed and forests grew.
In the southeast corner of Washington and the northeastern part of Oregon, 4,060 square miles of a broad uplift of basalt lava created a subprovince of the Columbia Basin, known as the Blue Mountains. The highest peak of the mountain range is 9,108 feet. Today the Blue Mountains are drained by several rivers, including the Grande Ronde and Tucannon, tributaries of the Snake River, as well as the forks of the John Day, Umatilla and Walla Walla Rivers, which are tributaries of the great Columbia.
In time, the lava cooled and solidified into basalt throughout the Columbia Basin, including the area of the Walla Walla River. Then, the floods came.
Thousands of years later, expeditions and early settlers traveling from the east of the continent would take note that the rugged and severely eroded landscapes in eastern Washington were quite unusual and different from any other land they had seen. The cataclysmic series of floods—named after Lake Missoula and also known as the Spokane Floods or Bretz Floods (named after geologist J. Harlen Bretz, who first recognized evidence of these catastrophic floods and referred to them as the Spokane Floods in the 1920s)—left behind proof that an ice age had occurred.
These violent natural floods, which caused great upheaval, destruction and fundamental change to significant ways of life in the region, took place during the last ice age over twelve thousand years ago.
The glacial prehistoric Lake Missoula, located in what is now the western state of Montana, was originally a body of water that was as large as half the size of Lake Michigan. Lake Missoula measured about three thousand square miles and contained five cubic miles of water. The sequences of floods occurred about forty times during a two-thousand-year period and swept like tsunamis across Washington and Idaho. The speed of the floods reached sixty-two miles per hour, and the great glacial lake of Missoula would be drained in periods as short as two