The pic below is the Columbia Gorge taken on a stormy day last weekend traveling along side the pitctureque highway, about a 3 hours drive from our home. The Columbia river is higher than it has been in years very muddy and rough waters. Two Atmospheric River Storms have caused record rainfall and flooding last week. A short history on how the Columbia Gorge was carved out of rock. Between 6 to 17 million years ago, ancient volcanoes erupted, streaming more than 20 massive basalt flows into the area that's now the Gorge where the Columbia river flows. They formed rock layers up to 2,000 feet high, cutting the canyon and becoming most of the rocks in the Gorge today. Many huge water falls along the basalt 2000’ foot canyon walls are visible from the highway. We are located up in the higher mountains of the foothills and the rivers down stream were blocked to get out to towns. It’s all cleared now but so much property damage down stream. News article of the flooding . https://www.thenewsguard.com/n... Pic of the Columbia river highest level in years & surrounding snow capped mountains on a very cloudy rainy day thru the car window. And the waterfall pic we stopped for a close up view and pics.
The dry streams in my area are flowing like rapids now. It's interesting to watch. Another, more recent part of the Columbia River Gorge and other local geology, was the Missoula floods in the ice ages. It makes for interesting reading. One estimate was that the water flow was ten times all of the rivers in the world. There were at least 25 massive floods. These floods carved put the gorge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods Blue - Cordilleran ice sheet Yellow - maximum extent of Glacial Lake Missoula (eastern) and Glacial Lake Columbia (western) Orange - areas swept by Missoula and Columbia floods http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/ The ice dam was 2000 feet tall. The floods carried ice-encased, car-sized boulders 500 miles. This was 12,000 years ago, so humans in the way of the floods would have been swept away. Part of me wishes I could get into a time machine and watch (from a safe distance - maybe in a dirigible?). Part of me also wishes I could get into a time machine and see the megafauna of the time - mastodons, wooly mammoths, giant sloths, camels and horses. But I wouldn't want to be close to a saber toothed tiger.
Lovely shots, Pac. Stunning actually. It is always nice to learn something about your part of the world.
