Twenty-two years ago, in graduate school, I came across a peculiar report of a rhinoceros that had been entombed in a lava flow of the Columbia River Basalts. How was this possible? How could the tender tissues of the rhino have been spared immolation by the enveloping molten (900°C) lava? Could this be true?

Over the years, I had kept alert for reports of the rhino, asking all who passed through those parts of the Pacific Northwest if they heard news of it. I occasionally heard that it was near Soap Lake, north of George, Washington, however, none I spoke to had seen the actual site.

In August 1997, my sons, now teenagers, and I had a chance to investigate this reported rhino.

Dubious inquiry

Driving west across Montana, we admired high glacial lake shorelines above Missoula, crossed a narrow Idaho, and entered Washington via the headwaters of the channeled scablands, a terrain of scoured landscapes and stacked Miocene basalt flows. The base of the flows frequently exhibited rubbly cavities, but all seemed to be due to erosion; none resembled rhinos.

The Miocene rhinoceros, a mature Diceratherium bull, munched contentedly on the green grasses growing lushly in the lowlands of the ancestral Columbia River drainage. He was a rhino, he commanded his landscape, he contemplated his supper.

Seventy miles from Soap Lake, we decided to start inquiries...someone had heard about the rhino in her biology class at Eastern Washington University! -- her teacher had been most enthusiastic about it -- BUT, she told us that he had clearly stated that it was in Idaho, perhaps on the Idaho-Montana border where we had just spent the previous night!

Undeflected, we continued westward towards Soap Lake, which I had circled on a map many years before... En route we admired huge gravel bars left on the incised basalt surface -- the multiple outfloods from Pleistocene Lake Missoula had scoured away the thick brown loess in a network of deep channels -- the gravel bars contain cobbles imported from Montana and Idaho, commingled with local basalt.

Towards evening, we arrived in Soap Lake, bypassed the town and headed for the bigger Ephrata. At the gas station I was looked upon strangely as I asked about the rhino; at the Chinese restaurant, the first waitress had never heard of it, but said that surely the other waitress, who had lived here all her life, would know; she didn't. At the movie theater we encountered the same pattern of disbelief (my queries were starting to echo a little oddly in my own ears).

Far away, in Idaho, a fissure etched across the Miocene landscape was breached by the buoyant forces of hot fluid basaltic magma. The lava fountained out, then spread relentlessly across the countryside, flowing across the tops of dozens of flows which preceded it.

Rolling out our sleeping bags on the plateau top, watching the Perseid meteor shower, we wondered if we were in the right area. Could the reports have been exaggerated, the rhino not real? At dawn, the landowner came to see if we might be trespassing Russian immigrants. Assured of our citizenship, he looked doubtful as he told us that he had never heard of a rhino in these flagrantly volcanic parts.

We stopped for breakfast in Soap Lake (ground zero on my old map). Alas, the waitress had no clue of a rhino...the trail was cold.

The rhino rambled on, disdainful of the distant line of fire marking the edge of an advancing lava flow; flows were common in his country, he was a rhinoceros, invincible. Grass and sedges beckoned succulently by the lakeside.

We drove north along the margin of a deep coulee to Dry Falls, where the visitors center (scheduled to open in an hour) commands an impressive view of what was briefly the world's largest waterfall. Here we picked up our first glimmer of rhino spoor, from a park worker who said he had heard of some such rhino and that we should ask in the park building by the lakeside campground. There a ranger said, of course! The rhino is around to the east of Blue Lake, and we should go to Laurent's Sun Village resort to get specific directions.

At the resort it was Rhino City -- they had framed newspaper clippings, a copy of a 1988 Washington Geology Newsletter report, and a sketch map of the site. One could approach the rhino either by land or by boat. We chose boat. With mounting excitement, we rented a rowboat for $2. Grasping the oars and life vests, we found the dock, selected a seaworthy rowboat, and embarked. We confidently inserted the oars in the oar locks and I moved to the helm to navigate while Will and Bobby each grabbed an oar. Coördinating oar strokes was problematic, but after a few loops and figure-8s, we eventually rowed ourselves past a promontory to the head of the bay indicated on the map to harbor the rhino. Here the wind grabbed us and blew us directly to a rocky beach at the foot of the scree slope below the lava flows that reportedly contained the rhino. "Climb to the white spot," we had been told -- high on the cliff face to our south there was some white paint, including a suggestive "R" visible at the base of a lava flow.

The lava flowed systematically, seeking the lows, flowing around promontories in earlier flows, filling valleys, covering lakes and ponds, further levelling the low-relief landscape.

We scrambled up the scree, edged up along flows, then across a short terrace and...there was a small, inviting cave entrance at the top of a short climb. Bobby entered head first and disappeared. His voice sounded hollow as he reported a rhino-like periphery from amidst a cavernous belly! Bobby emerged and Will entered (the rhino, though amply commodious, only accommodates one at a time).

Rhapsodic experience

After Will emerged, I crawled up the last slope and peered into the long-anticipated void. The rhino reclines on its left side, and one enters from the rear. Groping in the half-light, one can readily feel the deep impressions of the right rear leg and the two forelegs, as well as the snout, muzzle, and horn! The sensation of rhinowrapping is complete! On close inspection with a flashlight, skin textures are visible and even a bellybutton impression!

The rhino, moving before the flow, found himself trapped between the waters of the shallow lake and the advancing magma. The chaotic hissing and rumbling at the edge of the flow was fearsome, the prospect of crossing the mire before him impossible...he was trapped! Tongues of lava surrounded him, licked him...

About 8 feet from stem to stern, the rhino bulges slightly as the heat of the flow expanded him like a plump raisin cooked in a cake. While altogether empty today, early visitors collected bones, including a mandible. Beneath the rhino's flow there is a thin and silty soil, and nearby a log cavity extends into the cliff face. Clearly this flow solidified and cooled rapidly enough to preserve the debris on the landscape across which it travelled -- including logs and the rhino remains! Gazing out from the posterior, I admired the splendid view of the lake-filled valley and wondered how many companion rhinos might honeycomb the rocks nearby.

The rhino gasped, blinded by the hot steam and sulphurous gases emanating from the toe of the flow. The advancing, pillowing lava engulfed our hero, poaching him in his own juices and enshrouding him in a hardening mantle of solid lava.

As we descended the loose scree slope, the winds picked up and the loess started to be remobilized, blowing from the north. The clear day was obscured, and whitecaps appeared on the lake. We tried in vain to row into the wind, and finally had to haul the boat upwind along the shore, me dragging, the kids fending off with oars until we were able to return to the dock.

Ponder the fortuitous preservation of the body mold (by the lost-rhino process) and the propitious excavation of one of these chasms, carved by catastrophic Pleistocene floods, just wide enough to lop off the tail of the baked rhino, revealing the body cavity for us to reoccupy!

Rhino research

While arguably one of the most interesting fossils in the Northern Hemisphere, the Blue Lake Rhino mold has attracted only a modest amount of attention in the years since its discovery in 1935. The most significant papers are by Chappell, Durham, and Savage (1951) and by Kaler (1988).

The rhino-bearing lava is the Priest Rapids flow, a member of the Wanapum Basalt series, which is in turn part of the Yakima basalt subgroup of the Columbia River Basalt (Kaler, p.4). The flow is approximately 14.5 million years old. Studies of flow direction indicators show that the flow had turned back towards its southeasterly source in Idaho (over 120 miles away) and was probably flowing into a lowland marshy area.

Years later, we tapped on his tail and entered his presence, reverently.

The rhino mold is located at the base of the flow, entirely encased in a crudely developed pillow lava facies. Pillows form as basaltic lava enters water, the lobate and elongate "pillows" piling up in heaps at the base of flows. Near the rhino there are molds of logs at the base of the same flow.

In the late 40s a crew from Berkeley made a cast of the interior of the mold using jellied soap to coat the interior of the mold, then making sector casts of plaster which were removed through the tail orifice and reconstructed. The cast is on display today at the University of Washington Burke Museum in Seattle. Photos of the cast show a dead three-toed perissodactyl on its back, its feet stretched to the sky, its head so remarkably rhinoceros-like as to convince all viewers as to its origin.

The bones curated at Berkeley are fragmentary, one of the largest specimens being the left mandible with broken teeth. The teeth indicate a mature animal comparable to Diceratherium annectens from the Miocene John Day fauna. When first discovered, the left foreleg actually had bone still embedded in the base of the leg cavity. No bone is evident today, all being cataloged at Berkeley as UCB Museum no. 40307.

Traces of the plaster casting can be seen on the interior of the mold, but when you go, take a flashlight to see if you, too, can find the bellybutton.

Rhino reading

Chappell, Walter M., M. J. Wyatt Durham, and Donald E. Savage, 1951. Mold of a rhinoceros in basalt, Lower Grand Coulee, Washington. Geological Society of America Bulletin 62: 907-918.

Kaler, Keith L., 1988. The Blue Lake rhinoceros. Washington Geologic Newsletter 16(4): 3-8.