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Place of the Cattail Mat

Kukutali Preserve protects an island attached to the mainland by a landform called a tombolo. This connecting spit is made of sand and gravel deposited by wave action in shallow water. It is covered with scattered driftwood.

The traditional name, Kukutali, means “place of the cattail mat.”

Beacon Rock State Park centers on the prominent rock monolith that rises more than 840 feet above the Columbia River, but the park’s landscapes and stories extend well beyond the rock.

Boring Volcanics 

Beacon Rock is the core of an extinct volcanic cinder cone that erupted about 57,000 years ago. It is part of a volcanic feature geologists call the Boring Volcanic Field (named for the town of Boring, OR), as is the explosive caldera featured in nearby Battle Ground Lake State Park.

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.

Illahee State Park takes its name from the Chinook jargon word for “homeland.” The park lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Suquamish Tribe. Indigenous historian Vi Hilbert noted that today’s park occupies a site known as Xitca’sEb, meaning “to feel a tremor.” Geologists have mapped two main faults of the Seattle Fault Zone running north and south of the park area. The fault zone was the site of a major earthquake 1,100 years ago.

Seaquest State Park hugs the shore of Silver Lake in the foothills of Mount St. Helens, famous for its major eruption on May 18, 1980. A major attraction at the park is the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center, where the story of the mountain’s volcanic history is interpreted with exhibits, ranger programs and audio-visual media.

The Boring Volcanic Field

Battle Ground Lake is a part of a geologic formation called the Boring Volcanic Field (named for the town of Boring, OR), but the stories revealed in its bedrock are actually quite interesting!

In the Pacific Northwest, the slow-moving subduction of the oceanic crust of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate underneath North American continent produces molten magma that rises toward the surface. Sometimes, the magma reaches the surface and produces a volcanic explosion (like the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980). 

Sequim Bay State Park hugs the western shore of Sequim Bay, which takes its name from an Indigenous village located near its mouth. The bay is protected at its entrance by two spits that have developed over centuries atop a flat section of underwater land. The spits, which nearly enclose the bay, are made up of glacial debris from the last Ice Age—mostly sand and gravel—that eroded into the water from nearby bluffs and was carried by ocean currents. An 800-foot gap between the spits leads into the seven-mile-long bay.

It was a rainy morning. There were gray skies and a cold breeze; nothing like what we have come to expect from the last week of an Inland Northwest summer. But around 1 p.m., the clouds broke and revealed the full warmth of the afternoon sun just as the Girl Scouts and their families began to arrive.