A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
coulee
A coulee is a steep-sided valley or ravine, dry or nearly dry, cut into a plateau. On the northern plains, it means a gully or a draw that runs only after rain or snowmelt. In eastern Washington, it means something on another scale entirely: the enormous channels carved out of basalt by the ice age floods, of which Grand Coulee is the largest, a canyon fifty miles long cut by a river that no longer exists.
Etymology
The word came into English from Canadian and Louisiana French, from a verb meaning to flow, which also gives English coulis in the kitchen and cullis in old architecture. French speakers used it for a channel that flows sometimes, and English speakers on the plains took it for the channel whether or not anything is in it. Geologists later applied the same word to a lava flow, which is a different thing that also runs and stops.
Notes
The Channeled Scablands, which the coulees of eastern Washington cut through, were explained by J Harlen Bretz in the 1920s as the work of catastrophic floods from an ice-dammed lake in Montana. The geological establishment rejected the idea for forty years. Bretz was awarded the Penrose Medal in 1979 at the age of ninety-six.