Lava Flows

The panel says the top flow under this rest area runs all the way to the Oregon coast, and the claim is not far-fetched. Some of the largest Columbia River Basalt flows followed the ancestral Columbia through the Cascades and the Coast Range to the sea, where the lava ran into wet seabed mud and burrowed into it as sills and dikes. Geologists have traced at least eighteen to twenty flows from the plateau to the coast. One of them, the flow named for the petrified forest down the road, reached the Pacific at Yaquina Head.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ginkgo Petrified Forest — 8.3 mi
  A forest of stone logs that never grew together, found by a music teacher and his students in 1932 and left where it lay under cages the CCC built.
• Wanapum Heritage Center — 24 mi
  The River People's own center beside Priest Rapids, where Smohalla taught the Dreamer faith and a band with no treaty and no reservation still lives at its ancestral village.

More markers nearby

• Olmstead Place — 0.5 mi
• Beck Memorial — 15 mi