Flood Fest goes off without a hitch

DRY FALLS - On Saturday and Sunday, the Dry Falls Visitor Center celebrated cataclysmic floods that swept through the Columbia Basin during the Ice Age for the third annual Dry Falls Ice Age Flood Fest.

"This is just kind of a celebration for people that are mega-flood nerds," said Maurya Broadsword, interpretative specialist with Washington State Parks, who has organized the event two years in a row. "It keeps growing a little bit each year."

The purpose of the event is to help make people aware of the unique geological land formations in the area and the history behind them, she said. The last flood was about 11,500 years ago. Around that time, Dry Falls was ten times larger than Niagara Falls, she said.

The event featured representatives of the Ice Age Floods Institute, a national organization with 10 chapters serving Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

Several authors of books about the Ice Age were present.

David Shapiro is the author of "Terra Tempo," a graphic novel about the Ice Age floods. He said he's currently working on a sequel to the book.

John Soennichsen book "Bretz's Flood" chronicles geologist J Harlen Bretz's effort during the 1920s to persuade his peers that catastrophic, massive flooding was responsible for the canyons, buttes, dry cataracts, boulder fields and gravel bars that make up the Columbia Basin landscape instead of gradual flooding and erosion, which was the more widely accepted theory of the time.

Matt Fountain of Kennewick was camping with his family at Sun Lakes State Park when they found out about Flood Fest. He took his daughter, Addison, 7, to one of the activities at the event - making necklaces out of arrowheads.

"You can't beat making arrowhead necklaces," he said. "We're having a good time."