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“To know the land, one must feel it out inch by inch with the feet.” –Harvey Manning

A generous land donation and the hard work of community activists has ensured that Squak Mountain State Park will be an enduring piece of wilderness close to the homes of millions of urban residents.

Yakima Sportsman State Park owes its preservation and its distinctive name to the generosity of a group of waterfowl hunting enthusiasts who purchased lands in the Yakima River floodplain in the 1940s.

Folds, Floods, Meanders and Mines

The park is situated in a geographic area called the Yakima Fold Belt, an area of central Washington where tectonic compression of the layered Columbia River Basalt lava flows results in a series of parallel ridges that run perpendicular to the force of the stress—kind of like kicking a rug creates ridges in the fabric.

Cape Disappointment State Park spreads over the land north of the point where the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean meet. The park includes three headlands of basalt rock cliffs: Cape Disappointment overlooking the river, North Head above the strand of Long Beach, and McKenzie Head, midway between the other two headlands. The basalt bedrock of these wave-pounded cliffs are ancient lava flows that erupted on the ocean floor. Encountering the cold ocean water, the lava quickly hardened into bulbous masses geologists call pillow lava.

Flaming Geyser State Park straddles the Green River at the lower end of the Green River Gorge, a unique place where sandstone bedrock, covered by glacial deposits in most of the Puget Sound lowlands, is revealed by the downcutting of the river through the formation. Seams of coal interwoven with the sandstone fueled a mining industry in the local area. On October 4, 1911, coal miner Eugene Lawson drilled a test bore in today’s park area, attempting to locate a coal seam. At 390 feet deep, he found a seam 6.5 feet thick.

Lyons Ferry State Park occupies a place at the drowned confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers, where people have crossed over the rivers for millennia.

Ice Age Floods Carve a Canyon

The walls of the Snake and Palouse River Canyons, and the cliffs which soar over the park are made of basalt lava flows that erupted from vents in southeast Washington. The forces of plate tectonics continue to shape this landscape, wrenching and stressing the vast layered basalt flows that make up Washington’s Columbia Plateau, weakening the rock along subtle fractures.