‘Beautiful Wounds’: Journey through the Scablands

Anyone who has driven West on Interstate 90 has seen the Scablands. The area bears the scars of the great Missoula Floods of millennia past.

The geologist J Harlen Bretz knew that, though he was ridiculed for years for even suggesting the floods actually happened.

Tim Connor also knows the area well. And he shows just how well in his book “Beautiful Wounds: A Search for Solace and Light in Washington’s Channeled Scablands.”

Connor will present his book at 7 p.m. tonight at The Hive, Spokane Public Library’s public space located at 2904. E. Sprague Ave.

Conceived at first as a photography exhibition in 2019, the project evolved into a book that is far more than merely a collection of photos.

As The Spokesman-Review’s Stephanie Hammett wrote, “Connor interweaves personal and historical narrative with nature photography and geological records, telling his own story and that of the region he calls home in the same breath.”

The result impressed another Spokane author, Jack Nisbet, who wrote, “Tim Connor frames the raw skeleton of the Columbia Basin landscape between his own acute visual sense and human emotion. The result is a delicately shaded personal journey that reflects all the twists and turmoil of our signature geological event.”

Tonight’s event is free and open to the public.