A “bowl” and a “pitcher” sitting inside a state park nine miles from downtown Spokane sound like something a landscaper dreamed up. They’re not. They’re basalt — a circular depression carved into the Spokane River and a massive, fractured chunk of rock beside it — and the thing that put them there was one of the largest floods in Earth’s history.
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The flood that built a bowl and a pitcher
The basalt cliffs lining this stretch of the Spokane River came from lava flows that reached the area around 16 million years ago, part of the same Columbia River Basalt Group that shaped so much of Eastern Washington. That’s just the base layer, though. The “Bowl” and “Pitcher” themselves — a circular depression in the river and a huge, detached block of shattered rock beside it — got dropped into place much more recently, geologically speaking.
Around 17,000 years ago, Ice Age floods roared out of glacial Lake Missoula and tore through this canyon, ripping away weaker layers of clay, sand, and silt sandwiched between older lava flows. Whatever rock had been sitting on top of that soft material lost its footing and tumbled down into the jumbled position it holds today. It’s not a subtle process, and it shows: this is one of the most photographed sites in the park for a reason.
A bridge the CCC built twice
The suspension bridge crossing the river here has its own strange origin story. Civilian Conservation Corps workers based at nearby Camp Seven Mile built the original bridge in pieces during the 1930s, loosely assembling it near camp first to make sure everything fit, then taking it back apart, trucking it to the river, and reassembling it on-site…