Michael Wright: Lake Lenore Caves a worthwhile stop

It wasn’t a long walk, but it was a rewarding one.

Driving along Highway 17 recently, I came across the sign for Lake Lenore Caves State Park. Looking up, the caves were obvious – a sporadic series of indentations in the cliffs that make up the lower Grand Coulee, that rugged basalt and sage landscape that stretches south from Dry Falls.

A good cave is always worth the walk.

Within 15 minutes, I was standing in the cool shade of a shallow cave high on the canyon wall, looking west over Alkali Lake and Lake Lenore. It was a nice place to hide from the sun. It also made me consider the unfathomable span of geologic time, and the forces that once treated this landscape like a ball of Play-Doh.

First came the volcanic flows, depositing the basalt. Victor Baker, a University of Arizona geology professor, said the basalt in the area around the caves and the Sun Lake-Dry Falls State Park area is likely about 16 million years old.

Baker said the flows in that area created a distinctive structure that formed a framework for the caves.

“Part of the flow is a colonnade of these big hexagonal shaped columns,” he said.

Those columns formed in the interior of the molten rock, with a different layer of rock above them. Think of columns holding up a roof.

The columns and roof cooled at different rates. So, about 16,000 years ago, when the catastrophic flooding from the prehistoric Glacial Lake Missoula created the Channeled Scablands and the Grand Coulee, the two layers had different strengths.

The columns were weaker, and the water washed them away. The roofs stayed put, creating the series of caves high on the cliffs on the east side of the highway, intermixed with scree slopes and thick sagebrush.

Indigenous people once used the caves as shelters, and they are still used today for some Native American ceremonies, according to the Ice Age Floods Institute.

The trail at the state park brings hikers to the rock shelters. It starts with a staircase that cuts through a rock and comes to a bench. There, the trail splits. I headed south, following the trail as it led me to the edge of one of the larger caves – a half-sphere cut into the basalt.

It was fairly shallow – no headlamps required – but there was plenty of room to move around. The roof was all jagged rock, an ancient and more interesting form of the popcorn ceiling.

Some of the other caves along the trail are much smaller, looking like they might have just enough room for one person to lie down. More caves are visible beyond the trail.

The entire trail is a little more than a mile, and it could be explored in less than an hour. That’s about how long I spent there, my mind on all the reasons to get back on the road.

It wasn’t enough time to see everything, but that’s OK. It was plenty of time to convince me to return.