(gentle music) - Hey, everybody.

Welcome to "Mossback," the official podcast of the Mossback's Northwest video series from Cascade PBS.

I'm Stephen Hegg.

- And I'm Knute Berger.

- And today we've got a mystery for you, one of those scientific mysteries that makes you wonder, "Why haven't we solved this yet?

We've only had 15,000 years to do so."

About 15 miles southwest of Olympia, there's a prairie full of small, even hills, known as the Mima mounds.

What are they?

Why are they there?

Are they the result of earthquakes, fire, wind, glaciers, gophers?

There are so many theories and we still don't know for sure.

If you haven't already seen the video, take a moment to watch it.

It'll be a great kickoff to this conversation, and you'll get a clear picture of what these mounds of dirt actually look like.

You can find the video in the show notes, but for now, let's pile on.

(gentle music) Knute, like you, I've been to many of the weird and wonderful geologic features of the Pacific Northwest, the Palouse, Hat Rock, the Basalt pillars along the Columbia River, the Obsidian Flows, but I have not been to the Mima mounds.

Where are they?

And when was the first time you visited and what was your reaction the first time you went there?

- Well, the Mima mounds, it's interesting.

Many of the kinds of landmark things that you're talking about are very visible.

There's a freeway that goes right by them or, you know, there are very prominent aspects of the landscape.

In this case, you have, you know, hundreds of acres of bumps (both laughing) - Fabulous.

- Exactly.

And they're in a rural part of Thurston County.

And you know, you don't see 'em until you're right on top of them, basically.

And there's a preserve there that has fenced in this prairie full of very evenly spaced lumps.

And these lumps are about, oh, maybe six to seven feet high.

There may be 20 or 30 feet across.

And, you know, what grows there is surrounded by forest.

And what grows there is, you know, prairie grasses and you know, Camas flowers.

I mean, it's a beautiful place in the spring.

And there are trails that you can walk among the mounds and you're just in kind of, it's sort of like a hobbit-like natural community, except there are no people there.

And it's- - You expect to see a little wooden door on the side of one of them.

- Exactly.

It's that kind of magical landscape.

And it's a landscape that has intriguing theories about where it came from.

I first heard about it, I think in the '70s when I was going to school in Olympia.

And at that time, the mounds used to spread over, there used to be tens of thousands of these mounds.

And over the years, they've been plowed up, roads have been built, forest has grown up, and there was concern about we should preserve this last vestige of this remarkable prairie.

And so the Department of Natural Resources has a prairie preserve that's like a park you can drive in, park your car, and then go walk among the mounds.

And they have some viewing platforms.

It helps to get a little altitude when you view them, because that's when you can see how many there are.

You can sort of see the relative shape of the mounds.

They're very uniform.

That's one of the intriguing things is you don't have tiny mounds, huge mounds, vastly tall, they're all kind of the same rolling humps.

- When I first saw the video, I thought, "This looks like a skate park for the yet to be invented levitating hoverboards."

- Yeah, that would be a, (laughs) (Stephen vocalizing) That would be a great way to see them, you know, though, probably noisy.

You know, so I heard about them back then, but I didn't really think much about them.

Became a preserve in the mid-'70s.

I think 1976 was when it got kind of official protection.

And you know, it's just been a place that people kind of know about if you know about it.

But somebody has to tell you, you know, here's how to get there.

You know, here's where they are, here's why you might want to go.

And the first time I really paid any attention to them was when I was at "Washington Magazine", which was a statewide slick magazine.

And I heard about the gopher theory then, and so we can get into these various theories, but that was, like, an intriguing idea, concept, you know, that these might be old gopher mounds.

- Well, we'll get into that in a minute, but I'm intrigued as a video producer myself, but you and your video team went down to the Mima mounds with the podcast producer, Sarah Bernard, to get some footage.

And you mentioned that they're not as dramatic in that way that a lot of other geologic features are.

Was it hard to really capture the dimensions of them and the whole sort of landscape?

- Well, you know, they're a challenge, they're a challenge to film because when you're at ground level, in broad daylight, if you're there in the spring, they can be covered with wild flowers.

They can be very beautiful that way.

So we timed our trip down there to shoot them in the spring, although, because we had a really dry spring, it was late.

So it wasn't as flowery as it might have been otherwise.

I think that the challenge was to show the mounds so that you could see the sort of mass of the mounds, so you could see the mass of the mounds and the dimensions of the mounds.

And so we brought drones and we had to, one of the challenges was we had to wait until late enough in the day that the setting sun showed the shadows of the bounds.

And so in the video, there's a lot of aerial footage going over the mounds that give you a sense of the extent of them, but also the kind of remarkable characteristic that you can see when the sun is coming up or going down, either way.

Otherwise, to the camera, they look flat.

But when you walk among them, you're very aware that you're in a very unusual landscape.

And of course, this is what the original explorers and settlers experienced when they began stumbling across the mounds.

- Why does the Mima mounds fit with a Mossback's Northwest episode?

- Yeah, well, it wasn't until I visited more recently that I thought, "Wow, this would be something we could show."

Because I think the history of the mounds, I mean, there's what are they made of?

How do they exist?

You know, that whole question.

But then the history of trying to answer that question is also interesting.

And I think that one thing I try to bring to Mossback's Northwest is I think about Jacques Barzun, the essayist and historian who said geography is history.

And I think the geography, the physicality of environments, what happened before people got here, and then what people have done in a particular place, I think those are interesting history questions.

- And that's a theme of Mossback's Northwest and always has been.

- Yeah.

And we try to, you know, we try to answer some questions.

And in this particular place, the answers are few and far between or they're many.

- When you were there, did you see anything that surprised you?

Anything, any wildlife, anything that you didn't expect?

- Yes.

Well, one thing that really struck me, and this was on an earlier visit to the mounds when I first started thinking, "Oh, we've gotta do an episode about this", was I went there and I was walking around, I was remembering I hadn't been there in maybe five or 10 years, and there's a trail on the edge of the mounds where you see these large Douglas fir trees growing out of the mounds.

You know, you can see the way the forest is trying to reclaim this prairie.

- And there used to be 10,000 of these, or- - Yeah, many thousands.

Yes, I mean, tens of thousands.

It was very extensive in this kind of low lying area of Thurston County.

And so I was just intrigued with the way nature has reclaimed some of it, but then much of it is being protected and sort of gardened, if you will, so that the prairie part of it remains intact.

So, you know, one of the things that struck me is you don't see a lot of western meadowlarks on this part of the Puget Sound area.

And there beautiful meadowlarks flying around there.

We saw a coyote, and I think we got some audio of this coyote, and it was on the edge of the mounds, on the edge of the boundary, and it appeared to be a juvenile that was all by himself, and it was just howling and howling and howling, and it sounded so sad and so plaintiff that- - "What are you doing on my mounds?"

- Yeah, and I mean, the mounds are big enough, I had to get my binoculars out in order to locate this coyote, and so spot where it was and that kind of thing.

So there's a lot going on there too, because these prairies were maintained by indigenous people, and it's considered an oak prairie.

So they are allowing new Garry Oak, which is our native oak, trees to come back.

So some of the mounds have sort of small oak trees popping out of them.

- Well, I wondered why aren't there more trees encroaching?

Why isn't this covered with trees?

Because if you look in the not too far distant, there's a forest, there's an evergreen forest.

- Yeah, I think it's been one of those things where both forests and civilization have been encroaching for a long time, and they occasionally will cut down some of the bordering trees to create more sunlight for oaks reestablishing themselves, because they're considered the natural inhabitant.

But if you look at very early images of the mounds, they look very much like they did, you know, almost 200 years ago.

And so there was some way in which these prairies were not becoming overgrown rapidly.

- There's all kinds of theories about the Mima mounds.

What was the first theory of the mounds' mysterious origins that you came across?

- Well, in researching the history of these, you know, what did people think?

So from indigenous people who lived in the area, the Chehalis and others, they have a name that seems to indicate that they're a fairly recent phenomenon, so they're not- - Is that what Mima means?

- Yes, Mima in Chinook jargon, it has several different meanings, like you're almost there, but newness seems to be one of the possible meanings.

And indeed, they now know that the Puget Sound lobe of the great, you know, Cordilleran ice sheet that came down, it stopped just north of where the mounds are today.

So this area was not covered in ice at any point in that, you know, that.

But some of the theories think that, you know, are based on the idea that this place was ice covered and the melting ice might've helped create these mounds.

There are these things called sun cups, where they're pock marks in the ice, they fill with dirt, then the ice goes away, and you end up with these mounds.

- Sort of like a poorly filled ice tray?

- Yes.

You know, but that doesn't seem to be accurate, and it doesn't seem that they, it seems that they probably formed post retreat of the glaciers.

- Okay.

Theory number two?

- So theory number two, the first idea of, the first person who tried to look at them from kind of a scientific standpoint was Charles Wilkes, who led a global exploring expedition in the 1840s.

And he made discoveries in Antarctica.

You know, he was all over the place and he was in South Puget Sound, and he and his men did an overland trip from Fort Nisqually to Fort Vancouver.

And they were recording and reporting along the way.

Well, in 1853, he happened across what he called Bute Prairies.

Now I don't know much about the origin of that name, B-U-T-E prairies.

- [Stephen] Somebody's name.

- "So we soon reached the Bute Prairies, which are extensive and covered with yumuli or small mounds at regular distances asunder.

As far as I could learn, there is no tradition among natives relative to them.

They are conical mounds, 30 feet in diameter, about six to seven feet high above the level, and many thousands in number.

Being anxious to ascertain if they contained any relics", he was assuming that they were probably - [Stephen] Burial.

- Mounds indigenous people had done.

Of course, there in the Midwest and other places, there's a, you know, history of mound building.

"I subsequently visited these prairies", so he came back, "And opened three of the mounds, but nothing was found in them but a pavement of round stones."

So this was sort of both the first exploration into the mounds that we know about, and the first theory of them.

And he found that his theory wasn't holding up, but he still kind of thought, "I think they must have a indigenous origin."

- Hmm.

- So the area was, you know, being settled.

So it was called the Mima Prairie.

As far as I could see, as early as 1861, there was a post office established nearby that was called the Mima Prairie Post Office.

And so that's what we've known the mounds were since then in terms of the name.

Then I came across another theory, which is interesting, and there was a correspondent for the Oregonian who was passing through on a stage coach.

There was a stage coach line that went near them.

And he says, "The mounds on little and grand mound prairies attract the attention of all and cause many speculations as to their origin."

This is 1862.

- So this is after Wilkes?

- This is after Wilkes.

This is, you know, about 10 years, nine years after Wilkes.

"None of the reasons assigned have even appeared satisfactory to me.

Neither water, volcanic forces, nor man have ever had any agency in their production."

So he's very confident about dismissing all the other theories.

His theory was that there had been a forest fire that left these kind of root lumps of debris, that trees had been blown down.

And it says, "Large trees having been blown down, their trunks completely consumed by fire, leaving at their roots mounds of various sizes, depending on the magnitude."

And that's what he thought was the origin.

So part of his theory was that the blow down had to do with a tornado.

(Knute laughing) So he's got lots of these, you know, very different, different elements that he's imagining.

And I get a big kick out of the fact that he says, "I have the vanity to think this theory of their formation is more plausible than any other."

- Vanity being the operative word here.

- Exactly.

Yeah, and I poke fun at that in the video.

So we also have, you know, in the 1840s, Paul Kane, who was an illustrator with the Hudson Bay Company and other fur outfits.

And we have a lot of the very early watercolors that he made as he passed through the area.

And a few years after he was at the mounds, he made a beautiful painting of the mounds.

And there's an indigenous person standing in this landscape of mounds.

And that's very much like what you see now.

- I've seen it.

It's a beautiful painting.

It's just very, again, how small the human is against nature.

- Yeah, against those hillocks.

Yeah.

And we went to some lengths to make sure that we could reproduce that picture in the video, partly because it's so contemporary, you know, it just shows you how well they've been preserved, at least, you know, since the 1840s, 1850s.

- Yeah.

And a very human impression of them - [Knute] Yeah.

- That someone would, as you said, could have today.

- Yeah, exactly.

So clearly anybody who came across these not knowing anything about them, the immediate thing it spurred was questions.

Early on there were people who believed, well, they have to be, these have to be volcanic in origin somehow.

And that's been disproved by digging into the things.

And it's not that there's not a volcanic connection, but a causal thing has yet to be determined.

There's the UFO theories, you know, there are dozens.

- And then there's- - And some of them we already know, you know, are not true 'cause we know when the glacier, it didn't come down that far, and it left.

It doesn't mean melting ice wasn't involved.

So one of the most intriguing theories that came out in the early 1940s, 1942.

And it was two biologists, Victor Scheffer, who then was with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, well known in this area, northwest, 'cause he wrote "Year of the Whale", he wrote a wonderful book about whales.

And he and another guy, Walter Dalquest, became interested in the prairies.

They concluded that they were created by gophers.

- Were these two guys biologists?

- Yes.

You know, there was interesting, because, first of all, there are Mima-like mounds, mostly in the Western US, but they're scattered around.

There's some in California, there's Eastern Washington, there's some down in Louisiana, but mostly west of the Mississippi.

And many of those places have gophers.

Now, originally, the idea that came out was that there was some sort of large species of gopher.

- [Stephen] Giant gophers.

- Exactly.

Prehistoric giant, I mean, we have giant sloths, we have giant everything back in the, that these gophers built these mounds.

It would have to be a really big gopher.

- Bulldozer-sized gophers.

- Exactly.

And yeah, the idea were these gophers would be rooting through, you know, out wash or whatever, and pile up the soil.

And this theory was laughed at, kind of dismissed, but some biologists took it seriously.

Today, there are contemporary gophers, pocket gophers that live in many of the areas where there are mounds, but not in Mima Prairie.

There are pocket gophers that exist nearby, but not in this particular prairie.

- But what kind of timeline would it take for gophers to do this?

- Yeah, exactly.

So what some scientists have looked at in recent years, meaning, you know, the last 20 years or so, is could pocket gophers, the kind of gophers we have now, could they have created these mounds, and using computer modeling, they have shown that these little pocket gophers, if they had been building these communities over a period of maybe five to 700 years, could produce mounds of this size.

- So this is akin to humans building a cathedral over five or 600 years.

- Oh yeah, exactly.

I mean, you know, many hundreds of generations of pocket gophers creating these mounds and communities.

And it's interesting because it's easy to sort of scoff at the idea, but there a lot of biologists that take it seriously.

I mean, I talked to somebody who was saying, you know, if you talk to a biologist, they'll tell you gophers.

- [Stephen] Right.

- If you talk to a geologist, they'll tell you earthquake, flood.

You know, they have a different theory.

- Yes.

What would be the purpose of the gophers in doing this?

- Well, you know, they create mounds of soil when they're digging for roots and also when they're tunneling and digging.

But, you know, the mounds don't really show at this point.

Maybe they did at some point in the past, but at this point, they don't really show evidence of gopher activity in them.

There are no tunnels, there are no bones, there are no, you know, none of the things you might find if gophers had, in fact, lived there for a long time and created these things.

But at least in theory, given enough time and enough gophers, maybe they created the mounds.

So I think the thing that's interesting to me is not only there have been all these theories for so long, but that it hasn't been resolved.

And what I mean by resolved is there's no scientific consensus about what created them.

Now, there been some more recent theories that seem plausible.

I mean, talking to geologists, you know?

- Well, I was gonna ask, did you talk to our friend Nick Zentner about- - I did.

I did.

I talked to him, but he also had a video on YouTube where he was talking about some of the different theories.

And, in the video, you can see Nick act out part of one of the theories, which is that they were created by an earthquake, and it would take a certain conditions to create that.

But if you had a large area where there was an earthquake and liquefaction and you know, the right set of conditions, and this was a theory that got put forward after the eruption of Mount St.

Helens.

And there was a guy in Spokane who was pounding, like, with a hammer on a piece of plywood that was covered with Mount St.

Helens' ash.

And of course, the vibrations of the hammer caused the ash to form itself into an even- - Dance into mounds.

- Prairie, yes.

A prairie of mounds of this loose soil.

So it's known that that kind of thing can happen on, you know, various scales, but it would've taken an, you know, some kind of seismic activity at the right time, at the right place, with the right conditions for something like that to happen.

And, you know, some of the geologists we talked to seemed to lean somewhat in favor of that being a credible theory.

- In addition to Nick Zentner, did you talk to other geologists and scientists about their theories?

- Yeah, well, I talked to a good friend of mine who's also a wonderful writer with a geology background, David Williams.

And he wasn't really familiar with the mounds, but he's writing a, has written a book about the Cascades, which will be coming out soon.

And he said, "Oh, you gotta talk to this guy, Pat Pringle.

He's done a lot of research down there.

And he knows the mounds really well."

And he also has done a lot in the Cascades in terms of, you know, looking at places like Mount Rainier and whatnot.

He was part of the guys that were monitoring Mount St.

Helens, you know, he has a very extensive background, and he's a teacher at a community college down in Chehalis.

- Oh, okay.

So I see where you're going with this.

It's the puzzle of the Pimple Prairie with Professor Patrick Pringle.

(Knute laughing) - Very good.

Yeah, you pickled that pepper, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He's a wonderful guy, super knowledgeable.

And he's done a lot of research in a lot of areas that are fascinating to me beyond the Mima mounds.

And he takes his students there.

So they actually, you know, he does these field trips with students to look at the mounds.

And he took us to, there's a fenced off part of the mounds area where you can see a mound that has been cut in half, basically, so you can see the different layers.

- Oh, I see.

- What's in this thing.

And that turns out to be, you know, offer some clues.

- Did you see the layer of round stones?

- Yeah, exactly.

Kind of at the base, the mounds seemed to be on a layer of cobbles.

And this is something that Wilkes referred to, these stones.

He's also worked with a guy who has done LiDAR work, and he says that if you look at their orientation, the mounds are slightly ovoid.

They look round to us.

And that is all in the same direction.

They're all shaped in the same direction.

So the cobbles suggest that, at one time, this was a lake bed or a place where there was fast moving water.

- Now it's this Professor Pringle's theory?

- This is Professor Pringle's theory, and based on people he's worked with to sort of try and figure this out.

And so, you know, I think he thinks that the earthquake thing is plausible, but also there's some kind of flood story here, because the larger prairie in that area, Tenino, Grand Mound, et cetera, there are huge and small chunks of andesite lava from Mount Rainier all over the place.

But not a lava flow.

- But it's not a lava flow?

- No, not a lava flow.

This is old lava that makes up Mount Rainier and the areas around Rainier that have somehow ended up down in this prairie.

And the idea is that we had talked in last season, we talked about the Missoula floods.

There was some equivalent, or other kind of flooding from the same phenomenon, which was as the glacier retreated, the ice blocked melt from Rainier glaciers coming down the Carbon River, maybe the Nisqually and other rivers, built up a lake, ice dam breaks, and the stuff- - And the stuff just flows.

- Epically washes down.

- Yeah.

- And in this case, it would've brought that rock down through this lowland area and eventually out the Chehalis River to the Pacific.

And so he's done a lot of work on studying, you know, the origin of some of the valleys and their shape and where this rock exists.

And you know, that's really interesting, you know, because it could be that the reason this is somewhat complicated is that it was a multiple of events connected, you know, that the flood created soil conditions that then the earthquake shook into mounds or something like that.

- Right, more things can be true.

- Yes.

- And then the UFOs came in.

- Exactly.

Well, it's like they, you know, if ever seen like a description or video of an air crash, it's, like, never one thing, is it?

- [Stephen] Right.

- Right.

It's always, like, five things that caused this crash.

- Yeah.

Did Pringle give you a tour of the mounds?

- Yeah, we wandered around the mounds.

We talked a lot about it.

He took me to this quarry where we could look at him.

He loaned me his little, like, shovel that you can scrape.

We looked at the rock.

We found pieces of andesite, the Mount Rainier rock there.

He said about four, I think he said 40% of the gravel in the Mima mounds is from Mount Rainier.

So the Mima area didn't necessarily get these huge boulders, but you find some of those, like, further toward the mountain.

But it was clearly carrying a lot of rock.

And so he views it as possibly from the Carbon River, glacial lake carbon letting loose.

The interesting thing is, he says, it probably wasn't the only incident of that.

There are other parts of the Puget Sound lowlands that have probably been shaped by floods from the Cascades and the ice.

- What is the native perspective on the creation of the Mima mounds?

- Well, it's interesting that, you know, Wilkes said, "Well, they weren't particularly attached to the mounds or they weren't attaching significance."

But one story that's mentioned is that some believed that there was a flood of some kind that left large sea mammals stranded on what is the prairie.

And that these mounds were whales and dolphins and whatnot that got stranded there after some kind of flooding event.

In the instance of Crater Lake, which was created, you know, roughly 8,000 years ago where you blasted Mount Mazama, the ash wiped out a lot of people, but if you weren't in the path of the ash, like the Klamath people, they saw it and described what happened.

And then later on, scientists went up there and studied the eruption and the sequences of the eruption and that kind of thing, and found that the indigenous stories were very accurate in terms of the geology.

Now they had a lot of spiritual stuff they attached to that.

And I think that what, that's sparked a memory of mine when I read the possibility or this theory or idea that these were sea mammals, I remembered that some years back, I think maybe was it the '90s or even early 2000s, they discovered some prehistoric fossilized whales bones in the Chehalis River and nowhere near the sea.

And they're millions of years old though, you know, but could this theory about the Mima mounds being stranded sea mammals have come from an awareness or knowledge that fossils had been found in the area that indicated whales had been there.

These were whale bones that were in parts of the geology that were lifted from the sea and, you know, became part of Western Washington.

But it's just interesting to me that those two things have some kind of a connection.

- What's the wackiest theory, the UFO, any kind of UFO or extraterrestrial theory?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's just hard to take it seriously, you know, for me anyway.

- Yeah.

And, you know, that seems to be the place we go to if we can't explain something, it's spacemen, you know, it's aliens, it's, you know, that kind of a thing.

And I think, you know, in a lot of cases, if you think about, like, the whole von Daniken, you know, visitors from other planets have been here for years, and they built the pyramids, or they help the Incas, or, you know, whatever it is, it's often simply the fact that ancient people were far more sophisticated, created far more interesting and complex things, and they didn't necessarily meet somebody from outer space telling them what to do, you know?

So I kind of automatically downplay that.

But yeah, if somebody dug into a mound and pulled out something from another planet, then we'd have to rethink that, right?

- What theory do you subscribe to?

What makes the most sense to you?

- Well, I think it's the one that I lean to, and yeah, I'm no scientist.

I'm not an expert.

But having talked to various people and looked at them and whatnot, I lean in favor of some combination of melting ice, flood, and earthquake.

That sequence seems to me to have left bits of evidence that are, I think, are very intriguing.

And I think the whole thing fascinates me.

I love how stubborn the solution is.

You know, I love the fact that, you know, we can spend hundreds of years looking at these piles of dirt, and we don't know.

I mean, there are all kinds of unknowns, right, in the scientific world, it's driven by unknowns, and that's what furthers knowledge and all that.

But it's just fascinating to me.

It's like, it's a lump of dirt with grass growing on it, you know?

What could be so hard about figuring this out?

- I think because most geologic features have an explanation that there's consensus around it.

- Eventually they get to - Yes.

- Yeah, no, that's very true.

- So this kind of mystery is hard for people to understand or ignore or deal with.

- Yeah.

Well, when you think of something like the Missoula floods, I mean, everybody scoffed at that.

But that was on a, that you had to explain something that happened on a scale that no one could quite grasp.

Like, what kind of flood would be so big that it would create the Channeled Scablands.

You know, and of course, now we know that it did occur, and that it wasn't just one flood, that it was probably scores of floods over thousands of years.

And one of the problems with that, of course, is that every great flood would wash out the evidence of previous ice ages or previous floods.

So the sequencing of these things can get very complicated.

- There are other Mima mounds out there, there are other- - Yes.

- Where are they?

And has their origin been determined?

- No, I mean, so what's interesting, because Mima mounds has become anything that looks like our Mima mounds is now called a Mima mound.

But they mounds can have different origins.

I mean, some of them were built by indigenous people.

Some, you know, there are other processes of, you know, blowing post-glacial soil mounding up and creating hillocks or sand dunes, you know, that kind of thing.

These are processes that can create things that might remind you of them.

There are gophers that may, in some areas, have created mound communities.

They just didn't get to Notre Dame Cathedral scale.

(laughs) But I think it's interesting 'cause it's a harder question to answer if you're talking about how did all of these mounds get created as opposed to kind of just narrowing it down and saying, "Well, we know about these, they're in our backyard, we've dug into them, we have data.

How do these get created?"

And that may provide answers for elsewhere.

- Has doing this research changed your view about the region and its geological history?

- Well, I think the history part or pre-history, I mean, you know, I've talked with Nick Zentner and you know, it's sort of like, you know, you study the millions of years from our feet down, and I focus on the couple hundred years, or a couple thousand years of, you know, from the feet of what happened on top of all that dirt you look at.

But I do think that these historic questions of the what created geography, what created the, you know, our story is about places like Puget Sound, the Columbia River, the Cascade Mountains, that affected human history as far back as we know.

We know that, you know, it was fairly recent in geological time that the Cascades built to a height where they stopped the rain from reaching Eastern Washington, and they can date that.

You know, they know, like, you know what, X million years ago it was that the Cascade curtain was created and our history is, human history is completely affected by all of these things.

So, you know, to me, it's natural to then be curious about, well, where did those mountains come from?

Or what other landscapes were shaped by that flood?

You know, we did an episode last year about, you know, the lava 15 million years ago, these big lava flows that pushed the Columbia River into the Big Bend Country, you know, which completely changed the course of the Columbia River.

Well, we know, at some point, the Columbia River ran in some very different places.

It ran through Yakima.

There's some people that believe that, you know, it ran out at Grays Harbor or Willapa Bay at different times.

And there's evidence of that.

Well, how did that affect the people who lived here then?

Or if it was before people were here, how did the landscape change to become what it is now?

So, to me, that's all history that affects what happens on top of the dirt.

(gentle music)