Drumheller Channels coulees

Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.

Drumheller Channels is a region of basalt buttes and channeled scablands in Grant County, Washington, south of Moses Lake and east of Othello. Most of the area is inside the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Coulees here are the dry channels carved by the Missoula Floods at the end of the last ice age. Between the channels stand more than two hundred named basalt buttes, the resistant remnants the flood left behind. The landform covers about twenty square miles in central Washington.

The channels were carved by catastrophic outburst floods between fifteen and eighteen thousand years ago. Glacial Lake Missoula in present-day western Montana broke its ice dam dozens of times, sending walls of water hundreds of feet deep across eastern Washington at highway speeds.

The geologist J Harlen Bretz first proposed an enormous-flood origin for the Channeled Scablands in the 1920s. His interpretation was rejected by most of his colleagues for forty years before independent work confirmed it. Bretz lived to see the National Park Service recognise Drumheller Channels as a National Natural Landmark in 1986.

March through May, when the migratory birds are back in the refuge, the snowmelt fills the seasonal lakes, and the bunchgrass and arrowleaf balsamroot are in flower. Summer afternoons run above one hundred degrees, and the wind off the basalt can be hard.

No. The Columbia National Wildlife Refuge has no entrance fee. The refuge headquarters in Othello has maps and a small interpretive display, and the McManamon Road auto-tour route crosses the centre of the Drumheller Channels landform during daylight hours.

The buttes are basalt from the Columbia River Basalt Group, a series of enormous lava flows between sixteen and six million years ago. The lava cooled into hexagonal columns; the Missoula Floods plucked the columnar blocks out along joints, leaving the buttes as resistant remnants.

It has been a meaningful gift for many of our customers in geology and earth-science circles, and for friends and family of farmers and ranchers around Moses Lake and Othello. The Channeled Scablands are a landmark study site, and Drumheller is one of the clearest pieces of the story. A Medium or Large carries well.

The piece sits well in desert-modern interiors, in Western and ranch-modern rooms, and in earth-tone mid-century homes. The basalt blacks and dry-grass golds pair with oiled walnut, raw concrete, woven hemp, leather, and the warm reds of a Persian rug.

Yes. Current desert-modern direction favours art that names a specific landform rather than a generic desert scene. A National Natural Landmark with a clear geological story reads as place-anchored and pairs with the leather and warm-metal direction popular in Western-modern interiors.

Above a standard sofa, the Large is the everyday choice. Above a wider sectional or a tall stairwell, a four-tile Mural is right; over a fireplace mantel running the full chimney, the nine-tile Mural carries. Above a console or in a hallway, a Medium or Triptych works.

Yes, with the Dura Satin or Matte finish rather than Glossy. Both are scratch-resistant and tolerate humidity. The colour is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, so it does not fade in steam.

A microfibre cloth with water, or a microfibre with a mild non-abrasive cleaner. Avoid bleach, abrasive scrub, and acidic cleaners. The colour lives in the surface, beneath a thin glossy finish, and stays put with normal care.

Yes. Every WenderVista piece is original work by Reid Wender, hand-finished in the studio in Knoxville, Tennessee. The artwork is not licensed from any third party and is exclusive to Wender Studios.