Leashing The Pacific Northwest's Master Stream
By Joel Connelly
The Columbia River is a master stream of North America, originating in ice fields on the Continental Divide in Canada and eventually embracing rivers that flow through six states.
The river system helps define the Pacific Northwest, powers our economy, and grows the crops which feed us. We recreate in its waters and canyons and draw inspiration from its beauty.
The Braided River division of Mountaineers Books is fresh out with a beautiful and definitive work, Big River: Resilience and Renewal in the Columbia Basin. It celebrates the river, offering a photographic feast for the eyes, capsule biographies of river folk, plus serious discussion of restoring natural features of the river system. Its chief author, David Moscowitz, writes with eloquence and deep knowledge.
The Columbia Basin is a landform sculpted by nature and transformed by man. During the last ice age, a 3,000-square-mile inland sea, Lake Missoula, formed behind a half mile high ice dam. The great floods at the breaching of the dam unleashed “intense creative forces of movement and change,” writes Moskowitz. The floodwaters sculpted the inland Northwest canyonlands used 15,000 years later by today’s rafters and kayakers.
https://www.postalley.org/2024/06/06/leashing-the-pacific-northwests-master-stream/
= new reply since forum marked as read
