The Gem Of The Northwest

The Gem of the North West, the Columbia River was the work of Coyote in most oral traditions. Realizing that salmon were in the ocean and that people... more

by Jon Burch Photography

Title

The Gem Of The Northwest

Artist

Jon Burch Photography

Medium

Photograph - Digital Photography

Description

The Gem of the North West, the Columbia River was the work of Coyote in most oral traditions. Realizing that salmon were in the ocean and that people in the interior needed food, Coyote fought a battle with the giant beaver god Wishpoosh, backing him through the Cascade Mountains to the ocean and then killing him. It was the back-and-forth slashing action of the great beaver’s tale that scraped out the Columbia River Gorge and opened the channel to the sea. This made salmon available to the people. Coyote cut the beaver to pieces and distributed the pieces on the land, and they became humans. Later, Coyote tricked the five swallow sisters, who had built a dam across the river to block salmon, into leaving him alone there. While the sisters were away, he destroyed the dam, again freeing the way for salmon. The rocks of Celilo Falls were the remnants of the dam.

There are other legends about the origin of the Columbia River and its people, legends that also coincide with the geology and ecology of the area as we know it today. There were cataclysms of volcanism, floods and earthquakes. The first humans to live what is now the Northwest part of the United States migrated here between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago in two waves, one from Asia around the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean and another from northern Europe, to settle along the Columbia, and places farther south.

Much, much earlier, the ancient Columbia evolved about 17 million years ago, according to accepted geologic history. Before that, the rocks are difficult to read and open to interpretation. The ancient Columbia was a lot different from the river we know today. The course of the water formed following repeated floods of basalt up welling from the depths of the earth and spread across what is now central Washington and Oregon, into western Idaho and Montana. Flowing toward the center of a great depression caused by the sheer weight of some 90,000 cubic miles of basalt, layered in more than 200 separate flows, repeated basalt flows formed the area we know today as the Columbia Plateau of central Washington and Oregon. The great depression caused an inward slope from perimeter elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level to less than 500 feet in the Pasco Basin of south central Washington. The river, which began then as it begins now, in British Columbia, found its way to the ocean through what is now the Columbia River Gorge of the Cascade Mountains.

Beginning about 12 million years ago, the pressure began to warp the basin into the characteristic east-west folds that are the modern-day tributary river basins. It is something of an irony that the rich farmland of the Columbia Plateau, known as the Palouse Formation, resulted from extremely arid conditions between the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last Ice Age. During the inter glacial warm periods, winds deposited glacial dust and silt up to 150 feet deep in some places.

Toward the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, a series of catastrophic floods, perhaps the greatest floods ever in the history of the world, scoured the route of the Columbia through what is now known as Washington and the Columbia River Gorge. These floods, caused by the repeated failure of an ice dam at the outlet of Glacial Lake Missoula, did not change the route of the Columbia, but did scour its channel, and much of eastern Washington, down to the basalt layers and left the river with a rock-solid channel, in some places deep and steep-walled, laced with dramatic waterfalls.

Some digital effects were applied to the original image after the photograph was made. No electrons were harmed during the transition.

Image copyright 2023 Jon Burch Photography.

Uploaded

January 17th, 2023