"Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood"  Sasquatch Books, 2008

Author John Soennichsen delivers a vivid portrait of the man whose pioneering work began by accident, when a 1921 summer field trip to the Cascade Mountains fell through. Instead, J Harlen Bretz, a former science teacher at Franklin High School in Seattle and then a professor at U of W and later the University of Chicago, led his students on foot through the Washington Scablands around Spokane, and returned every summer after with his students and family to map, measure, and record the unique terrain-including the gigantic "ship" of eroded basalt at Grand Coulee, the dried remains of the world's largest waterfall (now known as Dry Falls) and the dramatic coulees, gullies and deserts.

Bretz's conclusions, of a land scoured in a virtual instant by a flood of unprecedented scale, met with intense opposition (largely from those who never observed the Scablands in person). Only over time, and with the advent of aerial and satellite photography, were Bretz's ideas confirmed; it is now known that glacial Lake Missoula drained dozens of times, each time unleashing a vast flood across the Pacific Northwest. I am half way though Soennichsen's book and finding it very informative and engaging.