Happy New Year from the Washington Geological Survey!
In honor of the New Year we’ve created many new lidar-derived images that we would like to share with you. These new images cover the state from east to west and include mountains, floodplains, glaciers, and other landscapes sculpted by geologic forces.
Scroll down to read more and use the associated links to view and download high-resolution versions of each one. You can find these and hundreds of other lidar images and maps on Washington DNR’s Flickr page.
The images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which means you may use them for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with or without modification, as long as you attribute us. For attribution please use ‘Image from the Washington Geological Survey (Washington State DNR)’ if it’s a direct reproduction, or ‘Image modified from the Washington Geological Survey (Washington State DNR)’ if there has been some modification.
Glaciers and snowfields of Mount Baker in Whatcom County. This view is from above Ptarmigan Ridge, looking toward the volcano from the northeast. Rainbow Glacier, Mazama Glacier, and Park Glacier are closest to the viewer.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Read more about Mount Baker here.
Top down view of Mount Baker’s glaciers, left to right: bare earth lidar, photo/lidar blend, photo.
The glacier boundaries shown above were digitized at a scale of 1:2000 from the USGS Mt. Baker Lidar project data, which were collected in August and September of 2015. The photo was modified from National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) data, 2017.
Deep fractures in and around Palouse River Canyon in eastern Washington. Before the ice age floods, approximately 15,000 years ago, the Palouse River flowed farther west before emptying into the Snake River. During the Missoula Floods, ice-age floodwaters overtopped the ridge here, scouring and eroding the land. They redirected the river and left behind these exposed bedrock fractures. Palouse Falls is near the center of the image.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Read more about Palouse River Canyon here.
Large alluvial fans below Slide Ridge on Lake Chelan. These fans have built up over centuries from stream sediment deposition and periodic debris flows caused by upslope erosion, often during heavy rainfall events. In 1995, an engineered drainage channel (which you can see in the fan on the left) was created to control and direct the flows. A new bridge has since been added on South Lakeshore Road to lessen the impact of the debris flows to the roadway.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Read more about Lake Chelan here.
The Nisqually River winding its way through glacial deposits near North Yelm. The Puget lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet occupied this area about 15,000 years ago and left behind glacial landforms that can still be seen today, such as the drumlins on the right side of this image.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Click here to download our recently published geologic map of this area (this will automatically download the publication).
Go here to see the Glacial Landforms of the Puget Lowland map.
Sherman Pass in the Kettle River Range. Sherman Pass sits on top of the Kettle Dome, part of a metamorphic core complex. Metamorphic core complexes are formed by movement along near-horizontal faults, known as detachment faults. Between 39 and 56 million years ago, the rocks located far beneath the ground here were brought to the surface by these detachment faults. This style of uplift tends to create broad, rounded mountains.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Read more about Sherman Pass here.
Lidar-derived relative elevation model of the Sol Duc River and floodplain in Clallam County on the Olympic Peninsula.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Go here to see Rainforest Rivers of the Outer Olympic Coast.
Colorized lidar point cloud image of the Bowl and Pitcher area on the Spokane River in Riverside State Park. The ice-age floods scoured this area and left these eroded basalt boulders in their wake.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Read more about Bowl and Pitcher here.
Tidal channels on the Nooksack River Delta in Whatcom County. This image was made with topobathymetric lidar data from the 2022 Nooksack River project. Topobathymetric lidar systems seamlessly measure and record land elevations above and below water in nearshore environments.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Puget Island and Little Island in the lower Columbia River. Most of the land on these islands is below 8 feet in elevation—roughly corresponding to the lighter greens in this image. The islands are protected from flooding by levees that line their perimeter (darker green in this image).
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Loess hills and eroded basalt in the Cheney-Palouse Tract of the Channeled Scablands, northeast of Ritzville.
Click here for the high-resolution version.
Go here to see The Cheney-Palouse Tract of Washington’s Channeled Scablands map.
The Washington Geological Survey collects, analyzes, and publicly distributes lidar for the State of Washington. Learn more about our lidar program at www.dnr.wa.gov/lidar. You can also access Washington’s lidar data directly from the Washington Lidar Portal: www.lidarportal.dnr.wa.gov.