After another night in Spokane, we drove down to Connell, WA where we entered the Washtucna Coulee. This picture is of a whalebacked gravel bar in the middle of the coulee. The bar is a bit difficult to make out in this picture, it is above the road and below the basalt cliffs you can see on the far valley wall. It is shaped a bit like the back of a whale, hence the name. The left end of the bar is being mined for gravel. The size of the bar precludes the possibility that a modern day river could form it, and in fact the coulee no longer has a river in it at all. Prior to the flood, the Palouse River came down this valley but the flood carved a new, shorter channel over a divide (which we'll see later).