Basalt enthusiasts to visit Columbia Basin

COLUMBIA BASIN — The flood-deposited basalt of the Columbia Basin will soon be carved and contemplated by hard stone enthusiasts.

A basalt-carving workshop called, “Assault on Basalt,” is from May 1 through May 5 on Stan and Pam Kaufmann’s property, located between Soap Lake and Moses Lake.

Master carvers Richard Hestekind, of Seattle, Tom Small, of San Juan Island, and Anthony Kaufmann, of Seattle, are leading instruction on carving the stone with special tools.

Basalt is harder than granite, said Kaufmann, a former Moses Lake resident whose parents own the property where the workshop will be held.

He said the event is less a workshop, and more a “love fest for basalt.”

“If you love it, there’s no work involved,” Kaufmann said.

Geologist Steve Reidel, archaeologist Sean Hess, naturalist Amy McDougall, and geologist and archaeologist Mark Amara will provide further insight at the event with talks and tours.

Canadian Gerda Lattey organized the event, inspired during a carving symposium.

According to Lattey, hot magma may have formed the basalt plateaus of the Columbia Plateau 17 million years ago. Then, 18,000 years ago, glacial ice in the Idaho Panhandle stopped Clark Fork River from flowing and caused Lake Missoula to form.

More than 3,000 square miles in size and up to 2,000 feet deep, Lake Missoula hid mountain tops and valleys. A dam holding the lake burst, Lattey said.

“There’s very few areas in the world that were carved out like this because of these floods,” Lattey said.

Kaufmann said the flood exposed the beauty found in the area today.

Lattey said carving participants must be at an intermediate or master level. Beginners are welcome to watch, she said.

“It’s one of the hardest stones you can carve,” Lattey noted.

The material has a hardness rating of “7,” compared with a diamond’s “10,” Kaufmann said.

“It can be incredibly challenging as a material because it’s 61-percent glass,” he said.

The process of creating a sculpture of basalt is like climbing a mountain, Kaufmann said.

Mountain climbers don’t ascend a mountain because it is fun, he said. They climb it for the 45 minutes of gazing when they reach the top.

“That 10 percent of ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh,’ is so gratifying, you would do it all over again,” Kaufmann explained.

Kaufmann said growing up in Hiawatha Valley inspired a love of geology.

A carving takes Kaufmann about two years to complete, including about 400 hours of physical labor.

Kaufmann is building a stone henge of Moses Lake basalt for a waterfront in Maine.

“It’s like a little flag from my home town,” he said.

Kaufmann discovered basalt carving in 1996. At the time, Kaufmann worked for a company in Seattle that built zoo habitats. He carved concrete to make it look like stone but had never carved stone before.

He noticed a large piece of column basalt and recognized it as coming from the Columbia Basin.

Kaufmann met the man who brought the stone there, and he became his mentor.

The one-day rate is $50 with no amenity use, or $100 with amenity use. The full four-day rate is $475.

For more information, call Gerda Lattey at 250-537-1526.