Getting here was incredibly rough on our poor little hybrid sedan; the road into the park is grooved like sawtooth, which is great for winter visits, I guess, but absolutely bone rattling for city slickers in a ten-year-old car like ours. I genuinely expected parts to start falling off the chassis like some Hannah-Barbara cartoon.
But we made it and were greeted by the most incredible lunch spot and view. Palouse is the official state waterfall and is significant to me mostly for what isn’t here; I love that Wikipedia even includes a whole section about it:
“In 1984, the Franklin County Public Utility District proposed a 98-foot-high (30 m) dam be constructed upstream of the falls, allowing for a significant hydraulic head for hydroelectric power generation. This would have provided over one-third of the county’s power and would have reduced ratepayer charges substantially. However, the majority of the ratepayers declined to approve the investment, preserving this geologically significant feature.”
Whoever wrote that will forgive, but never forget, apparently.
Power is the subtext of everything out here: exploitation, extraction, preservation, perseverance.