I just caught a bit of a conversation about some landslide in the Nile Valley or Natchez Valley in Washington State.
Something about flooding with it too.
Is there anybody with more direct news about it?

Must have been this:
Landslide

Great, that looks like it. Thanks.
I doubt if my spelling of Naches would have ever found it.

Yes, this one caught a large chunk of the west coast in it. Seattle is threatened. Evacuations. San Francisco is on alert. Dogs and cats, living together. Madness.

I shouldn't joke - I saw the subject line and it sounded a little like folks have forgotten Yakima is a couple hundred miles from the west coast. You know, like those maps of the US drawn by New Yorkers, with Albany out near Vancouver and the midwest about a half hour's drive. Anyway, I meant no slight, and the land slide is real and impacting some good folks who live in the Nile Valley. Geologists are tying this slide to historic landslides in the area, bing up the Cleman Mountain landslide and you'll see prehistoric slides of 800 foot depth, entire mountain sides, biblical stuff. This latest is at least enough to relocate a small community I think, which is sad, its pretty country for horses. Maybe they get lucky, and re-build on top of what slid down this week.

Check out the slide show and stories at the Yakima Herald website, http://www.yakima-herald.com/, local has it best at the moment.

The first I heard about it was from one of my crews yesterday who was reading about it in the van. He is from there, and says that that area is historically unstable.

Here is a nice explanation of it that I found this morning: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010057844_weblandslidenothingnew13.html

Sue

Yeah, some of my old stomping grounds. Basically river cuts through alluvial/till and the angle in some places gets a bit too steep. They don't stabilize the grade when they put in the roads, and with a little moisture at the right time of year it heaves and sloughs down the side.

Some geologists have characterized the area as alot of till on a bed of broken basalt - which acts like a layer of ball bearings. Which makes sense to me - you climb up the hillsides around that river and you can actually see the broken basalt. The rest is gravity, and the river wins in the end.

One regret I have is that I don't have a geologists eye for terrain - you walk a valley like the Nile with an experienced geologist and you could learn alot. My sympathies for the locals, they live in a hard spot now.

I took a geology course that spent a deal of time in eastern Washington. Went to college out there too. Its is a deep rolling area of farming over broken basalt. Too much rain and a you get slides.