- In the Pacific Northwest, it seems like water is everywhere.

It is the lifeblood of the region.

No geographic entity defines us like the Columbia River.

It forms part of the border between Washington and Oregon.

It flows from the mountains of Canada through the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean.

It feeds our people and powers our industries, but despite its centrality to shaping the region, some of its history is little known to most of us.

If the Columbia River has been around for millions of years, how has it changed?

What forces have altered it?

Why did explorers have such a hard time finding both its mouth and its headwaters, and why was finding it so important?

So follow us while we explore the Mighty Columbia's tumultuous history.

- Well then we're on the world of Seven Wonders that the travelers always tell some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well.

But now the greatest wonder is an Uncle Sams Fair Land.

It's the King Columbia River and the big Grand Cou dance - For many people.

The King Columbia River begins and ends with Grand Coulee Dam, the iconic 1930s project that produces cheap hydroelectric power to fuel homes, heavy industry and harness water to irrigate Washington's crops.

The dam is the icon of the river, even to those who never visited.

It also damaged the world's greatest salmon runs and disrupted cultures along the river that had existed there for millennia.

But Grand Cooley Dam is not the most impactful thing the Columbia has ever seen.

Grand Cooley Dam is not even the biggest dam that has stopped or diverted its waters.

The river we know today has been radically transformed by enormous forces.

We can hardly imagine.

The Columbia or some version of it has existed for at least 17 million years, but the river has been through cataclysmic changes both before and after humans arrived on the scene.

One of the most notable is how the River's course has changed.

Over time, the ancestral Columbia ran roughly diagonally across Washington state from British Columbia, then out to the Pacific.

It is the greatest river in North America that flows west, fed by ice, snow, melt, and tributaries.

It draws from a vast interior region from the Canadian Rockies and the Grand Tetons to the depths of Hills Canyon and rain soaked mossy rock.

But the river's course was warped along the way.

What bent the river?

Nick Sinner is host of Cascade PBS's series.

Nick on the rocks where he explains northwest geology, he suggested we meet here on the river to understand what skewed the Columbia's course.

Nick, skip.

Where are we and why did you bring us here?

- Thanks for coming.

First of all, this is Shalan and the Columbia River is flowing north to south right by the town, and what's cool is that both sides of the river are not matched geologically.

So east of the river, there's this basalt lava, 16 million years old on the west side of the Columbia.

It's not lava at all.

It's this Tite, which is 160 million years old from 20 miles below the surface of the earth.

So the idea is that Columbia has not always been here.

- So in ancient times it kind of ran diagonally maybe across the state.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And then something put this big bend in it.

- You got it.

- And that was the lava.

- That was the lava.

The lava pushed the Columbia to this present location.

So yeah, before 16 million years ago, we're quite confident that the Columbia River came outta British Columbia and flowed essentially straight to Tri-Cities in southern Washington.

But here comes this molasses erupting out of a volcano in northeastern Oregon, and there's three miles thick of this basalt lava that just buried the mountains and pushed the Columbia river right to this very spot.

- A major detour.

- You got it.

- If volcanic fire shaped the landscape and changed the river so too did ice over the millennia.

Ice ages came and went.

The last ice age began to recede.

Some 17,000 years ago.

The vast courtier ice sheet came down from the north and was thousands of feet thick.

It had pressed south into Puget Sound in the west and in the east.

It extended into the Okanagan, the Spokane area, northern Idaho and Montana.

As ice advanced and receded, it altered the landscape, the ice sheet blocked and unblocked rivers, including the Columbia.

Around 15,000 years ago, the massive ice sheet blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho and the lake, we call it Glacial Lake Missoula, formed behind a 2000 foot tall ice dam.

The lake is believed to have had a water volume as great as that of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined.

But the dam breached and sent a flood of almost inconceivable size across the land, sweeping away everything in its path.

It dug Eastern Washington's channel scab lands terrain that looks like it has been scoured raw by a galactic fire hose.

It scoured out Grand Cooley.

It flooded the Columbia basin and places new lakes formed where flood waters backed up at choke points like Wallula gap.

The Columbia had taken millennia to burrow a gorge through the Cascade mountains, but the flood waters now made the gorge wider and deeper.

When the flood smashed through it and spurted out the west end, it had a wall of water 500 feet high.

It raced down Oregon's Willamette Valley all the way to Eugene, carrying enormous boulders stuck in icebergs, floated hundreds of miles from the nearest ice sheet and then dropped them on the landscape.

Jay Harlan Bretts, a former Seattle high school teacher and dogged professional geologist was fascinated by the unusual topography and geology of Eastern Washington in the early 20th century.

He carefully studied every nook and cranny.

Dry falls suggested a waterfall like Niagara Falls once flowed there.

But where did the water come from?

The evidence he believed pointed to a landscape shaped by an ancient flood.

Many of his colleagues thought the idea was preposterous.

They resisted in part because they rejected a theory that sounded so biblical instead of adhering to a more gradual shaping of the landscape through time and erosion.

What is accepted now is that not one epic flood sculpted the landscape, but that a succession of epic floods pulsed through 40 or more of them over 2000 years, wiping out everything in their path, gouging out valleys wearing away hills, scattering debris, exposing the bedrock, killing wildlife and human inhabitants in its path.

And Lake Missoula wasn't the only ice damned lake one in northern Washington called Glacial Lake Columbia formed when ice blocked.

The Columbia for a time sent it down Grand Cooley.

The water that once spilled over dry falls, the draining of that lake was the source of flooding too.

The extent of the floods and their various sources is still being studied.

Some perhaps far older than the Missoula.

Whatever happened, it was catastrophic and complicated.

A puzzle geologists are still putting together.

So the Columbia River was altered drastically before humans altered it in ways that Woody Guthrie celebrated in song.

- But now the greatest wonder is an Uncle Samsara land is the King Columbia River and the big grand Cooley Dam, - The river that indigenous people knew that trappers and traitors encountered at the dawn of the 19th century now has 14 dams from its headwaters in BC to its mouth.

At Astoria, the transformation has been in the blink of an eye compared to the epic forces that have shaped the river.

We've come to know over the millennia For such an important river, you'd think its Euro-American explorers would've been happier finding it.

The Columbia River is more than 1200 miles long running from the Rockies to the Pacific.

Yet the mouth of the river is anything but Pacific.

As a North American river, it is second only to the Mississippi in the volume of water it discharges.

It is the largest river flowing into the Pacific from North America, and it drains an area the size of France.

At the point where the Columbia enters the sea is Cape disappointment.

When you come here, you notice a lot of gloomy names have been attached to the land and seascape just over there is a place called Dead Man's Hollow.

Upstream a bit is a place called dismal Niche.

When explorers, Lewis and Clark, who traveled from the east to nearly reached their goal of the Pacific, they were lashed by a cold and wet winter storm.

They sought shelter for a week in a gap in the rocky shoreline, which Clark called a dismal little niche.

Today it's a roadside historic site and the river's mouth and adjacent coast has long been known by sea fares as the graveyard of the Pacific.

Why all the gloom explorers looked for a great river of the West that could be a shortcut across the continent.

They never found it.

Perhaps that fueled a sense of frustration.

A Spanish explorer, Bruno Hasta in 1775 thought he saw the mouth of the Columbia, or maybe it was only a bay.

So did a British trader named John Meers, who named a cape for his disappointment in not finding the river.

Captain James Cook, perhaps the greatest explorer of his age, sailed right past it.

To be fair, he was not at a latitude.

He was bound to explore others who should have found it, missed it too.

Like cook's one-time midshipman Captain George Vancouver, it became less of a disappointment to colonizers.

When American Robert Gray figured out it was a mighty river that might open the interior of the Pacific Northwest to trade an exploration he dubbed at the Columbia after his ship.

Even if it wasn't the fabled Northwest passage, it was clearly important, but it was tricky to navigate if the river's mouth was hard to discern from the sea, the rough waters made entering the river dangerous and often deadly.

The Columbia brings vast quantities of silt and gravel with it, and it's shifting sandbars lay where the rough Pacific and its storms and tides meet the river's enormous outflow.

Getting in and out is notoriously hard.

The Coast Guard runs a lifeboat school near the Columbia's mouth for rescue and heavy seas, the only school like it in the world.

You can still see the remains of shipwrecks here or hear stories of maritime disasters on the nearby coast.

Some going back to the 16 hundreds in settlement times, the sinking of the General Warren in 1852 was a much remembered tragedy.

The schooner rigged side wheel steamer left Astoria for San Francisco in bad weather and crossed the bar with an experience pilot.

It was ravaged by a January storm and turned back in a gale and fighting an uptide in the river's current.

The general Warren was beached here on Tup spit the river mouth Southern shore, nine men were sent to get help in the only lifeboat, but before help could arrive, the steamer was battered to pieces on the breakers.

The remaining 42 on board were all lost.

An entry in the Oregon encyclopedia says that the wreck of the general Warren, perhaps more than any other, established the Columbia bar's reputation for destructiveness other victims in the years followed with regularity.

In the next half century, the schooner rambler, the bark leones, the macaw, the cousins, and the Peter Dale all wrecked on the spit.

Since 1792, an estimated 2000 ships have sunk at the Columbia's mouth or on the nearby coastline with hundreds of lives lost.

The river also wreaks a kind of geologic havoc under the ocean.

During the last ice age when the sea level was hundreds of feet lower, the mouth of the river and the continental shoreline was another 40 or 50 miles further west.

Since submerged and the river doesn't end where you think it does, its flow continues underwater.

It's helped carve the Astoria Canyon and underwater abyss that extends some 75 miles out.

The Columbia continues to shape our region above and below its surface.

The town of Astoria, Oregon sits at the Columbia's mouth and at the continent's edge.

It was the first US settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, founded by John Jacob Astor's Fur Company.

Today people visit to vacation on the Oregon coast and see the Goonies house.

Each winter northwest Fisher poets put down their nets to read their poetry and drink local brew.

The horse barks a deep grunts of sea lions gathered by the hundreds to eat salmon provide a background chorus that forms a riverside soundtrack.

In 2012, a brawl between fishermen and loggers occurred in the streets outside a local tavern.

Here is still a vintage feel of an older rustic northwest.

The world's not perfect, but at the meeting place between Mighty river and wind whip sea, it's harder to feel disappointment.

In July of 19 96, 2 young men watching the annual hydroplane races on the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington stumbled across something shocking in the shallows near the shore, a human skull.

It was a discovery that didn't reveal a crime scene, but rather stirred up an even greater controversy.

The skull in its accompanying skeletal remains were dubbed Kennewick Man by the media and the ancient one by the Columbia region's.

Indigenous peoples questions and debates erupted.

How old was it?

Was it a paleolithic man or maybe even an ancient Polynesian Asian or white person who had once wandered the America's millennia?

Go And who did the remains ultimately belong to the government, museums or local tribes.

If nothing else, the bones became a flashpoint with enormous implications for understanding of the people of the Columbia region.

Let's fast forward to what we know native people's claim.

Cayman was an ancestor and they were right in 2017.

DNA testing revealed the remains of the ancient one were some 8,500 years old, and he had a direct ancestral connection with indigenous people of the Columbia.

Specifically, he was connected to people of the United Tribes of the Colville who supplied DNA samples.

For comparison, his human remains are thought to be among the oldest yet found in North America.

He has since been buried in a secret location.

It is apt that his bones would be found along the Columbia.

The river has been a major artery a factor in both populating and depopulating.

The region.

His antiquity speaks to the long importance of the river in terms of trade and settlement.

Along its banks were villages gathering places and trade connections that link tribes throughout Western North America.

A major trade center at Sali Falls on the lower Columbia was flooded by a dam project in the 20th century.

But before that, it was a meeting place for thousands of people, Columbia plateau, tribes and traders.

It was no coincidence.

It was a source of abundant salmon trade was a lifeline dried fish.

Shells, whalebone and Camus were commodities.

Traveling east the horses, buffalo robes and wapato flowed West Fur Trader Alexander Ross in 1811 described the native gathering he saw as forming the great Emporium or mart of the Columbia.

By the late 18th century, western trade impacted the region.

Guns, blankets, glass beads and disease made their mark on indigenous lifeways.

If Columbia peoples had flourished since time immemorial along the river, diseases brought by Euro-Americans such as smallpox, measles, typhoid, influenza swept through with colonial trade came pestilence starting in the late 1770s, diseases from outsiders swept the northwest coast and traveled up and down the river.

It radically reduced flourishing populations.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a malaria disease is believed to have killed 90% of the Columbia rivers remaining indigenous population.

The Columbia acted as a gateway for newcomers.

The fur trade employed English, French, Canadian, Scottish, Iroquois, Metis, Hawaiians, and mixed race employees in exploring, trapping and establishing forts and trading posts.

Shipwreck, Spaniards, Mexicans, Filipinos, black sailors, and Asian fishermen washed up on the coast sometimes survivors blending into local tribes.

The great migration of mostly white Americans starting in the 1840s flooded the Oregon Trail.

They put down roots for homesteads and founded towns along the river.

They plied the water with Steamboats.

The region became a magnet for immigrants and immigrants, such as the Chinese Scandinavians and fins.

As the resource economy took hold, milling, logging, salmon, canning, mining, and shipping crops, it's no wonder that a Chinook based trade language evolved, known as Chinook jargon so that these many voices could communicate using a millage of indigenous words, French and English throughout the region.

The character of the river has changed utterly but not hiss role in facilitating commerce, trade and human interaction.

Words like SK for strong, chuck for water, Boston for American, and Alai for buy and buy.

The loss of the indigenous river is still felt today exemplified by the tragedy of SLO falls.

The great rapids near the Dows, where native people use scaffolds over the river and spears and nets to fish.

Massive salmon runs that once traversed this section on their way to spawn upstream.

This 10 mile stretch of whitewater was sacrificed to inundation by the construction of the DAOs Dam in 1957.

For thousands of years, the ancestors of Oregon indigenous artist and poet Elizabeth Woody, lived here in what was what's called Y am, which he has written means the sound of water on rocks.

The dam that drowned sil disrupted one of the longest continuously inhabited sites known in North America.

It's fish fed people for millennia.

Woody born after the dam writes that she has only known the falls by their absence, by the stories of their importance and abundance.

She has written that she lives with its loss much like an orphan lives.

Hearing the kindness and greatness of his or her mother.

Woody reminds us that we are all orphans of slo, even if we don't know it.

The Sinai IX people's traditional lands extend from kettle falls and the Colville reservation in the US to the Columbia's hairpin turn.

Micah in the North Sinai storyteller, James tells of the river's origins.

Coyote once met and fell in love with rain.

Rain fell for coyote and ripped out her heart for him.

And where her heart landed became the headwaters of the Columbia and the blood that flowed from it was the river.

The river is indeed the region's lifeblood.

Today its headwaters are acknowledged as Columbia Lake, an eight mile long body of relatively shallow water.

When the first white fur traders came over Athabasca pass from modern day Alberta just to the north, they built a trading post Kni house near present day in Vermeer, bc.

They essentially set up camp close to what turned out to be the origin of the great river they were looking for.

Without knowing it, David Thompson, a Welsh Canadian fur trader and surveyor who led the group in the early 18 hundreds, was sent to explore and survey the unmapped region, exploit its fur bearing resources, and figure out where the Columbia started and follow it to its mouth.

In 1811, Thompson and his exploring party became the first known Europeans to navigate the Columbia's entire lake.

They were the first whites to travel from Kettle Falls later drowned by Grand Cooley Dams, lake Roosevelt to 1940 to the River's Junction with the Snake River near present day Tri-Cities, the comparatively placid damned river.

We know today was rough going back then with falls and rapids.

But Thompson's trip was not only in the service of the fur trade and finding a route to the Pacific, but also of laying claim to the region ahead of competing American colonizers spurred in part by the explorations of Lewis and Clark.

Thompson mapped much of the Columbia's drainage in western Canada, Idaho, Montana, and Washington.

Reading accounts of Thompson's adventures in the region, one gets the sense of its remoteness in isolation.

Even today.

This stretch of mountain ranges, valleys, rivers, lakes, and fjords is complex and beautiful and still encased in wilderness for many Americans.

The Columbia River just disappears from thought and view north of the US border, but nearly 400 miles of the river runs through this spectacular country.

Even for a seasoned adventure like Thompson, who was often reliant on the aid of local first nations peoples for survival, the region carried a whiff of the primeval.

During a trek over Athabasca Pass to the west side of the Rockies, Thompson's party encountered a fresh set of footprints in the snow, which is indigenous companions believe were made by an elephant like creature that his tradition had it lived in the area.

It was said to be about 18 feet high and to sleep standing up sometimes leaning against trees.

It was not a carnivore, but a vegetarian Thompson thought the tracks could have been made by an old grizzly bear with worn claws, but had his doubts.

Throughout the 19th century, there were rumors that wooly mammoths might still wander.

The Northlands author Jack Nesbitt, who followed in the footsteps of Thompson for his book, sources of the River, has written quote, it's hard not to be intrigued by the account the Whirlpool River drainage does have an ice age look about it, and it has the room, the vast empty spaces that it would take to harbor an outsized rally.

Indeed, this part of Canada still gives us a look at the era of glaciation that shapes so much of the Pacific Northwest and continues to.

The Columbia starts here with rain, snow, and glacier melt.

The vast Columbia ice field in Rockies that straddles the continental divide between Alberta and bc.

Its meltwater eventually feeds into three oceans, the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.

You can view it from the Ice Field Parkway between Banff and Jasper National Parks, the mountains here, dwarf visitors, even mammoth sized ones.

One could appreciate its scale by walking on one of the ice field's, big toes, the Athabasca Glacier.

At its eastern base, the Columbia ice field supplies water to the North Saskatchewan, Athabasca Frazier, and Columbia Rivers.

It is thought to have formed some 200,000 years ago during the Illinois and Glaciation, which reached as far south as Illinois.

Like many glaciers and ice fields that feed the Columbia, the ice field is shrinking.

So too are British Columbia's glaciers.

Canada's Columbia basin contributes some 30 to 40% of the river's total runoff from snow and ice.

The future of the northwest fresh water supply, irrigation, fish habitat, and hydropower partly lie here.

A study of the journal science published in 2023 concluded that most glaciers in Western Canada will be gone in 80 years due to warming global temperatures Due to drought and decline in snowpack, hydropower production has been down significantly.

Though demand is rising.

Roland Columbia is a phrase that can't be taken for granted.

The generation being born now might be the last to know the river and its headwaters as we have known them.