Formed by Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades

> Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.

> ...

> He earned his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago four years later ... returned to eastern Washington to take a closer look at the plateau and its scablands.

Yep, just a high-school teacher. One who got a PhD in the field (in the days when PhDs weren't commonplace) and then went looking for the answer.

One wonders how much of the rest of the article is 'helpfully embellished'.

The place didn't fool scientists. Most scientists who were "fooled" had never even seen the place with their own eyes. According to the article, many of those who did see the place quickly changed their minds.

The scientists had fooled themselves, thinking they could know nature without even seeing it. Which was actually a common attitude back when it was rather expensive, not to mention dangerous, to travel long distances just to see some rocks. Of course this kind of excuse has rapidly lost its power over the course of the last century.

I live in Spokane, not terribly far from this area. The scablands really are spectacular and well worth a visit. The Palouse is simply beautiful. Even here within city limits we have impressive cliffs like those described in the article. I've done a small bit of climbing in the past, and these sheer cliffs look to me like they're begging to be climbed, but I've never seen anyone "lured" to them at all. I wonder if scablands rock is generally "rotten" or if there's some other reason that climbers avoid these structures?

edit: grammar

> let the observer take wings of the morning to the uttermost parts of the earth: he will nowhere find its likeness

And a beautiful addition to the genre of teacher-as-hero.