Let Your Feet, and Your Imagination Roam at Rowena Crest and Tom McCall Preserve
Scenic Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve area provide an incredibly scenic place to let your feet, and your imagination wander as you look out on a major chokepoint along the Ice Age Floods path. The wildflower displays are amazing during the Spring, but several compelling flood-related features are visible from the vantage of the Rowena Crest Viewpoint any time of year. Rowena Crest lies nearly 700 feet above the Columbia River at the upstream end of the Rowena Plateau, a miles-long plateau that the river flows along. Just upriver from the plateau is the narrow section of the Gorge known as the Rowena Gap The drive to the viewpoint on old Hwy 30 from either east or west is a spectacular ride through a wonderous section of the Columbia River Gorge. A roundabout parking area at the viewpoint, with a safety wall above a sheer cliff, provides a great observation point eastward toward Rowena Gap. At Rowena Crest it’s easy to imagine what it might have been like to witness the approach of those massive floods. There is not yet scientific evidence that humans were in the area to bear witness to the Ice Age Floods, but there is solid evidence of humans in the Americas by that time. And there is growing concensus that if they came in during a glacial maximum, they would have come in by a coastal route that offered plentiful food and shelter for their journey. The mouth of the Columbia River would have been the first major waterway path inland that might have led them to settle in the area of the Floods. Your village might have been situated across the Columbia at the mouth of the Klickitat River where the town of Lyle now sits. If you were foraging, or just relaxing, atop Rowena Crest on a late summer day, you might have felt the ground begin to temble as if there were a small earthquake, but the trembling would have slowly increased for a few hours. Eventually you would have heard a low roaring sound that also grew over an hour or more before you could see turbulent brown muddy water begin flooding across the broad basin to the east. Then the roaring flood of water, only a few feet deep at first, would have entered the narrows, now called Rowena Gap, and sped on, crashing against the promontory you’re standing on and being diverted toward your village which was quickly washed away by the muddy torrent. But the muddy flood waters would have kept rising, unlike the Spring floods you’re used to on the Columbia, becoming a hundred feet deep, then two hundred as the levels just kept rising. Soon a huge whirlpool formed in the flood waters near the base of the promontory and a giant eddy formed where your village had been as flood waters flowed backward up the Klickitat River even as the bulk of the water continued downstream on the main stem of the Columbia. As the flood waters reached 400 and 500 feet deep and kept coming, suddenly to your right a huge block of the promontory broke off and slumped down into the rampaging flood waters. Now you would have begun running south toward higher ground, climbing higher and higher as the still rising flood waters poured across the plateau and plunged into the small creek valley to the west, tearing away at the valley walls and massively widening that little valley. Eventually the flood waters stopped chasing you upward as you climbed higher, 200 then 300 feet above the now submerged promontory. Now as you turned and looked out across that expanse of muddy water you could see massive white blocks of ice being carried along on the flood waters, similar but inconceiveably larger than the ice blocks carried on the river during the Spring floods. But the flood waters didn’t begin to recede that day, nor the next, as they might in the Spring floods. In fact it was almost half a lunar cycle before they began to slowly recede, exposing a mud coated Columbia River valley that was now noticably wider, with layers of shear vertical rock walls extending over 1000 feet above the normal river level below. As you began the recovery from the floods devastation, your family returned from from their hunting and gathering in the high mountain meadows, and you have an incredible story to pass along to them and your ancestors. This story is easy to imagine as you look out to the east from Rowena Crest. The onrushing Ice Age Floods waters easily flowed over the low relief of the broad Dalles Basin to the east, but the major Rowena Gap created a chokepoint in the path of the floods as they made their way through the Columbia River Gorge. This “hydraulic dam” forced the flood waters to build to over 1000 feet deep in this area, flowing hundreds of feet deep over Rowena Crest while forming a temporary lake in The Dalles basin. It is estimated that many of the 40-100 Ice Age Floods may have taken up to a month to completely flush through the system to the Pacific Ocean, but the duration of the flood waters at any point along the path probably lasted less than a couple of weeks. But this was more than enough to create several major floods features visible from this vantage point. At Columbia River level below and east of the promontory is a round Kolk pond that was created by giant whirlpools in the flood waters as they were deflected around the Rowena Crest promontory. Other similar Kolk features can also be seen on the Dallesport area to the east, and along the hiking path atop Rowena Crest where they are marked by surrounding groves of oak trees. grew Across the Columbia, the floods deposited a huge eddy gravel bar that the entire town of Lyle, Washington is built upon. The Klickitat River was backed up for miles
Hydraulic Modeling of a Missoula Flood
Chris Goodell’s 1-hour video presentation of his Ice Age Flood hydraulic modeling is both enlightening and thought provoking. Chris is a hydraulic modeling professional for Kleinschmidt Group, whose personal interest in the Ice Age Floods phenomenon led him to privately undertake HEC-RAS modeling of a possible Ice Age Flood hydraulic response. His presentation for American Society of Civil Engineers – Environmental & Water Resources Institute – Seattle (ASCE EWRI Seattle) provides interesting insights to the Floods Story even as it recognizes many of the obstacles and shortcomings of what we can know about details of any Ice Age Floods.
Smithsonian Article about the Ice Age Floods
Ice Age Floods Smithsonian Article Devastating Ice Age Floods That Occurred in the Pacific Northwest Fascinate ScientistsThe Scablands were formed by tremendous and rapid change, and may have something to teach us about geological processes on Marsby Riley Black – Science Correspondent – April 19, 2022 for Smithsonian Magazine The Earth seems to change slowly. Continents shift by about half an inch in a year. Sea levels rise by less than a quarter of an inch in the same amount of time. Mountains are constantly being eroded but, to us, seem to stand today just as they did yesterday and the day before. Our planet’s geological history often seems like one of slow, grinding change. But that’s hardly the whole story. Sometimes geological change comes startlingly, violently fast, leaving scars on the Earth’s surface. The Channeled Scablands of the Pacific Northwest, a landscape full of flat-topped plateaus that rise between steep-walled canyons, are among the vastly-altered landscapes that have caused researchers to rethink what they previously presumed. The geologic wounds are dramatic evidence that quick and catastrophic changes have played a significant role in shaping our planet. The Scablands, principally located in southeastern Washington state, bear the signs of an incredible Ice Age event. Between 14,000 and 18,200 years ago, huge glacial lakes on the boundaries of ice sheets burst from their natural dams and rushed over the landscape, scouring the hills and dropping massive stones as they went. Entire hills were washed away as the floodwaters dumped gravel, boulders and sediment in new places, almost like shaking a great geological Etch-a-Sketch. But this is a relatively new understanding, only broadly accepted since the 1970s. It took decades for geologists to construct even an outline of what the Scablands represent, a realization that proved to be a turning point for science. For if intense floods could carve such features once in Earth’s history, surely they could have changed landscapes at other times and in other places—even those as far away as the Martian surface. Geologists only began to pick up on the story of the Scablands a century ago. In the 1920s, naturalist J Harlen Bretz wrote several descriptive papers on the strange basins and odd channels of the area. Those channels had been created by moving water, but the way water had once flowed through the area seemed to make no sense. “The channels run uphill and downhill, they unite and they divide, they head on the back-slopes and cut through the summit,” Bretz wrote, “they could not be more erratically and impossibly designed.” The only reasonable conclusion, Bretz proposed, was that the Scablands were created by massive and short-lived floods. Bretz’s colleagues were not ready for such a conclusion. Ever since geology came into its own as a science in the 19th century, much of the field has been influenced by the concept of uniformitarianism—that the present is the key to the past. In a broad sense, that’s an excellent rule. The Earth is still changing, and many of those alterations—from erosion to volcanic eruptions—also occurred in the past. But some additional stipulations to the older formulation of the idea were unnecessarily taken as truth. One of them was that the Earth is changing at a slow, gradual rate and that quick, catastrophic change was impossible. Bretz’s idea for how the Scablands formed flew in the face of what many geologists accepted. Channels were carved over long periods of time by rivers, other geologists thought, not by sudden floods. To Bretz, the evidence was unmistakable. Among other things, the Scablands contained layers of gravel hundreds of feet high. Slow-moving streams couldn’t have left such vast accumulations. Pieces of gravel are larger and heavier than particles of sand or silt, requiring faster-moving water to pick up the gravel and transport it. Gravel deposits as tall as skyscrapers must have required an incredible amount of fast-flowing water. The pattern was consistent with the underlying geology of the area, as well. The rock beneath the massive flood deposits was relatively friable volcanic rock, easily broken and carved. The fragility of these rock layers allowed the floods to gouge out channels and canyons in a way that harder rocks would have been more resistant to. Yet the fact that Bretz couldn’t identify the source of the floodwaters caused many to dismiss his idea, and it wasn’t until evidence of similar events—such as Ice Age flood beds found in Montana—that other experts began to reconsider what Bretz had proposed. Eventually, by the 1970s, dismissive geologists changed their tune. Something catastrophic truly did transpire to create the Scablands. Not that the behavior or history of such floods are completely understood. “There are loads of outstanding questions and many people are thinking carefully about the Scablands,” says University of Washington geology PhD candidate Kelsay Stanton. Even though experts are confident that vast glacial lakes provided the water for the floods, the precise volumes of the repeated floods are unknown, and the timing of the dozens of outbursts has yet to be determined in detail. “The glacial outburst flooding of the Pacific Northwest is hardly a closed subject,” Stanton says. Part of what’s allowing geologists to keep going back to the Scablands is that the tools available to scientists have changed a great deal since Bretz’s time. “There are lots of geochronology and computer modeling methods now that weren’t available when Bretz and other early researchers were mapping the area,” says University of Massachusetts Amherst geology PhD candidate Karin Lehnigk. These repeated floods affected the ocean, she notes, with the influx of freshwater reducing the saltiness of the northern Pacific for years and altering the way colder, saltier water in deep ocean layers circulated. The floods affected more than the land they ran over, and have acted as models for how our modern glaciers might alter ocean circulation as they melt due to global warming. New, broad scale methodologies can offer some of these insights and these refined techniques have proved to be critical, as no one has ever
Explore the Columbia River Gorge
The Columbia River Gorge is an incredibly popular area to visit, and that’s for good reason, the setting is uniquely spectacular. The Gorge encompasses: Easily accessible ecozones that range through boreal conifer forests, oak woodlands, high desert grasslands and alpine environments in only 40 miles, Dazzling viewpoints and scenery, including beautiful waterfalls that cascade over the high basalt ramparts that bound the relatively narrow Gorge and the majestic Columbia River running through it, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood, imposing snow-covered stratovolcanoes lying less than 40 miles north and south of the Gorge, Picturesque small towns that are bounded by extensive federally- and state-protected natural areas throughout the length of the Gorge, Abundant recreation opportunities including hiking, road/mountain biking, windsurfing and kiteboarding, whitewater kayaking and rafting, fishing, hunting, alpine/cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, Numerous award-winning wineries and breweries, restaurants and pubs, shops, galleries, museums, parks, hotels and campgrounds, And all this is lying at the back doorstep of Portland, Oregon. The Gorge is also a geologic wonderland, exposing stories about: The 40 million year history of the Columbia River, The series of massive Columbia River Basalt flows 18-12 million years ago, The rise of the Cascade Mountain Range since about 5 million years ago, The passage of numerous, up to 1000 feet deep Ice Age Floods that reshaped the Gorge 18-14 thousand years ago, Tectonic faulting and folding, landslides, earthquakes, forest fires, and The often intertwined lives and stories of the people who have lived here. Of course, with all this bounty the area is also a robust tourist mecca, which can mean limited accommodations for summer crowds. Most attractions are easy to drive to, but bus tours and river cruises are also available. Due to the popularity, some of the iconic attractions now seasonally restrict vehicle access and require permits.
Traveling the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
In September 2021 my wife and I took a trip to see what was new along the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail and visit some places we did not make it to in our very first trip in 2004. The IAFI chapter brochures were very helpful in learning what there was to see in each area. We also remembered a preview of the National Parks Service unigrid map brochure that will come out hopefully later this year, so be sure and get one when it debuts. The other excellent tool was the online interactive map on the Ice Age Floods Institute website (https://iafi.org/floodscapes/), where you can click on a spot and see a photo and description of the site. All are great planning tools. We drove to Missoula, Montana and stayed there a couple of days as we made day trips. Our first one was to Ovando to see a granite glacial erratic that the Glacial Lake Missoula Chapter had etched and placed at the high-water line. You will find it at Trixi’s Antler Saloon which is a nice place to grab a bite for lunch. The chapter has a number of these high water markers placed already and have more planned to show the full extent of Glacial Lake Missoula. Unfortunately, due to the smoke from the wildfires we were not able to go to Hamilton to see the 8-ton granite erratics outside Ravaili Museum with four interpretive signs outside and additional displays inside. We drove up to the Paradise Center in Paradise, Montana. We had been there before in 2016 for the fall IAFI field trip and they were just dreaming of what the old Paradise Elementary School could become. They have done a wonderful job of making that dream come true. It was one of our favorite spots on this trip. They have dedicated an entire room to the Ice Age Floods story where an extremely accurate 3-D map of Glacial Lake Missoula has lights installed so you can push a button to light up the edge of the ice lobe and other features. Besides information about the Ice Age Floods, the Center also has wonderful displays about the trains & train yard that used to be in Paradise and the history of the Paradise Elementary School. We went to the Natural History Museum in Missoula and enjoyed the panels and video which told the Lake Missoula Floods story and also about Joseph Pardee, a very important pioneer in solving the mystery of these Floods. This museum also displays an amazing amount of taxidermy showing the wildlife and birds in the region. On our way up to Sandpoint, Idaho we passed through Eddy Narrows. Glacial Lake Missoula drained through this canyon going 80 mph leaving horizontal marks high up on the walls. Previously these were thought to be glacial striations, but Pardee speculated that these marks were from huge boulders as they shot through the Narrows. The Narrows is long with few places you can pull over on Highway 200, so it can be hard to really appreciate its scope. We got a good view from the Koo-Koo-Sint Bighorn Sheep Viewing Interpretive Site which has several interpretive signs that talk about the sheep and the geology of the Clark Fork River Valley. We then went over to Farragut State Park at the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille to view the beginning of the outburst plain that formed the Rathdrum/Spokane Valley aquifer. Across Lake Pend Oreille is Green Monarch Ridge; the terminus of the Purcell Trench which held the 4,000 ft. ice dam that carved the steep walls. The display at the museum has several interpretive panels. The next day we met Consuelo Larrabee who gave us a personal tour of the 40,000 square foot Ice Age Floods Playground in Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington. She and Melanie Bell, the president of the Cheney-Spokane chapter, did an enormous amount of work as consultants on this fabulous, themed park. Kids can learn as they play on the three-story Columbian slide tower, Glacial Dam splash pad, log jam climber, an alluvial deposit fossil dig, and more. The park was filled with kids and the adults were enjoying it as much as the kids. We loved watching the excitement of a child as she saw the splash pad water fountains simulate the ice dam starting to rupture and then the cascade of water flooding over the manmade basalt rocks. Along the side of the building are actual basalt columns and the fossil dig led to many exciting discoveries by the children as they dug through the sand to reveal embedded replicas of fossils. Throughout the park are thoughtfully placed benches for people to sit and watch the fun going on around them. There are nine interpretive panels throughout the park adding a wonderful educational benefit to all the fun. This park will be quite a prize for years to come. The next day we drove along Highway 262 to W. McManamon Road to the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark. This outlet from the Quincy Basin, with floodwaters going 65 mph eroded not just the topsoil but the underlying basalt which created dramatic channels, basins, potholes and buttes. The viewpoints along the drive had several interpretive panels talking about these wonderful vistas. Since we live in Portland and this trip was to see places we had not recently seen, we skipped over the many wonderful places in the Columbia River Gorge, Willamette Valley & Tualatin. But for your trip, please check out the hundreds of beautiful and interesting sites to see in this region. The last stop for this trip was Cape Disappointment. The Floods debris flushing out the mouth of the Columbia River added substantially to submarine Astoria Fan and sediment cores have shown that ocean currents carried some of this debris all the way down to Cape Mendocino, California. Although not visible from the surface, the Park display has a relief map that shows the Astoria Canyon
First Americans Toxic Debate Hobbled Archaeology for Decades
Bluefish Caves directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Evidence had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age. From there, the migrants seemed to have hurried southward along the edges of melting ice sheets to warmer lands in what is now the United States, where they and their descendants thrived. Researchers called these southern hunters the Clovis people, after a distinctive type of spear point they carried. And the story of their arrival in the New World became known as the Clovis first model. Jacques Cinq-Mars, however, didn’t buy that story—not a bit.
Earth Appears to Have a 27.5-Million-Year ‘Heartbeat’
Geologists have been investigating a potential cycle in geological events for a long time. A recent analysis on the ages of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years show a catastrophic 27.5 million year pulse in eight clusters of world-changing geologic events over geologically small timespans. This pulse of clustered geological events – including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganizations, and sea level rises – is incredibly slow, a 27.5-million-year cycle of catastrophic ebbs and flows. As you can see from the graph, some of those times were tough – with over eight of such world-changing events clustering together over geologically small timespans, forming the catastrophic ‘pulse’. “These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the team writes in their paper. These cyclic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and mantle plumes, or might alternatively be paced by astronomical cycles associated with the Earth’s motions in the Solar System and the Galaxy. Luckily for us, the research suggests we have another 20 million years before the next ‘pulse’.
First Peoples Ice-Free Corridor Migration to Americas Reexamined
Analysis of how long erratics have been exposed on ice-free ground in the hypothesized “Late Pleistocene ice-free corridor migration route” suggests that route was not fully open until about 13,800 years ago, and the ice sheets “may have been 1,500 to 3,000 feet (455 to 910 m) high in the area where they covered the ice-free corridor,” according to study lead author Jorie Clark, a geologist and archaeologist at Oregon State University. Clark said, “we now have robust evidence that the ice-free corridor was not open and available for the [Late Pleistocene] first peopling of the Americas.” If evidence of humans in the Americas prior to the 30,000 years ago is ultimately found, that evidence does not preclude the possibility of ice-free corridor migration before closure of the corridor.
Humans in the Beringia Yukon ~24,000 Years Ago
Archaeologists have long debated how and when people entered the Americas. Throughout the 20th century, the mainstream hypothesis was that the Clovis people were the first to pass into Alaska about 13,000 years ago. Stemming from his excavations between 1977 and 1987 at the Bluefish Caves in northwestern Yukon, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a Canadian archaeologist, unearthed evidence that hunters were using the site some 24,000 years ago. Lauriane Bourgeon, a French archaeologist, has spent much of her career re-examining and dating the Bluefish Caves collection to clarify the history of the contentious site. Her research has shown that at least 15 bones from the Bluefish Caves were cut-marked by people as early as 23,500 years ago.
Asteroid That Decimated the Dinosaurs May Have Struck in Spring
Spring may have been when a roughly seven-mile-wide asteroid struck the Earth, immediately triggering the mass extinction that would wipe out 76 percent of known species. That key piece of timing doesn’t come from dinosaurs, but from the fish that swam in the waters dinosaurs drank from. By studying the fossil bones of these fish and comparing them to their modern counterparts, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam paleontologist Melanie During and colleagues have come to the conclusion that the impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs most likely occurred in the spring. Like their modern counterparts, ancient sturgeons and paddlefish of the Hell Creek Formation, found in the “Tanis” fossil site in North Dakota, grew in cycles. Those researchers proposed that this place contains critical clues about the first minutes and hours of what transpired after impact—including well-preserved fossil fish that contain asteroid impact debris in their gills. During warmer months when food was plentiful, the ancient fish grew and added more bone tissue just as their modern relatives do. During cooler, harsher months, however, their growth slowed and left a line—called a line of arrested growth, or LAG—in their bones. In addition, the bones of these fish contained signatures from oxygen and carbon isotopes. The geochemical signals in these isotopes were influenced by what the fish were eating and the waters they swam in, a natural phenomenon that has been used by paleontologists to study everything from when early whales took to the seas to what plants ancient herbivores ate. Details of the prehistoric sturgeon and paddlefish bones indicate that these fish had not yet hit the peak of their annual growth spurt, which would be expected during the warmest parts of the year. The carbon isotope ratios in the paddlefish bones also match up with this pattern. If these ancient fish lived according to a similar annual cycle as their living relatives, then the signatures in their bones hint that they perished in spring. The fact that tiny spherules thrown into the air during the impact were found in their gills places the time of death within minutes or hours of the end-Cretaceous impact. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that the impact took place while the Northern Hemisphere was in spring and the Southern Hemisphere was still in winter. Read more in the Smithsonian Magazine article by Riley Black that this was taken from, or a Science Alert article that also recaps the paper published in Nature.