Costal Geology with Nate Loper

Creation Fellowship Introduction and Speaker Welcome

Okay, I'm Terri Kammerzell and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account, as told in Genesis, is a true depiction of how God created the world and all life in just six days, a matter of about 6 ,000 years ago.

We've been meeting in this online format since May of 2020, and we've been blessed by a wide range of speakers, some pastors, authors, scientists, doctors, all sorts of people who love the Lord and have a message to share.

And you can find links to most of our past presentations by typing in tinyurl .com forward slash CFS archives. That's C like creation, F like fellowship, S like Santee, and the word archives. And while you're there, you can also click on the list of our upcoming speakers.

We still have a couple more remaining for 2023, and soon we'll be adding our list of 2024 speakers, so you'll want to check those out. You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com. We promise not to spam you, but we'll send you links to all of our upcoming speakers.

Tonight, we're super blessed to have back with us Nate Loper. Nate is the Executive Director of Canyon Ministries, which provides creation-based rim, backpacking, and rafting tours of the Grand Canyon.

In his previous role as a pastor, Nate traveled the nation teaching in churches, schools, and Christian universities for over 20 years. He has also led tours through dozens of national parks and natural history museums in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Earlier this year, Robin and I got to take a road trip up the west coast of the United States, and we observed a lot of beautiful shores and rock formations, and we were curious about how they got there.

So we invited Nate to come and talk to us about coastal geology. With that, Nate, I'm happy to turn it over to you.

Coastal Geology Along the Pacific Coast

All right. Well, thank you, Terri. You kind of gave me a big topic here, coastal geology, because there's a lot of coast in America, and there's a lot of rocks out there too, a lot of that geology. There's a few things we'll talk about tonight, but let me go ahead and start this sharing here, and hopefully that will come up correctly.

There we go. I think that should be up. So yeah, tonight we're going to talk about coastal geology. I used to live myself down there in Southern California, right near the coast, so quite familiar with California coastlines and the geology.

Of course, I've also been fortunate to take some of those road trips up the coastline. I've been to California and Oregon and Washington and seen just such a vast array of beauty and of God's creation on display.

There's also a lot of variety as well. When it comes to coastal geology, we do have a lot of coasts we could talk about across the entire world, and there are some beautiful coasts that stretch all the way across the world and throughout many places we can see anywhere.

Tonight, we're really going to focus primarily on the coastal geology that you have right there in California. That's the West Coast, California, Oregon, Washington, the Pacific Coast geology. Tonight, my hope is to maybe do some overview of some of the things that you might see on a coastline, or nearby the coastline even.

Then, how do some of these coasts get formed? How do we see this from a biblical creation and flood perspective? Then, what do we see and how does it speak to things like the global flood and evidence for that?

We'll cover a few things like that. I know I do sometimes talk kind of quickly, and there's a lot of topics we may cover tonight. Now, any one of these topics could be a whole entire discussion just by itself if we wanted to, but we'll kind of touch a few different things.

The nice thing about, even if I do talk quickly, the nice thing is it's a video, so you can stop it, pause it, rewind, and catch up a few things. Anyhow, the California coast, especially that coastline, the Pacific Coast, really is, in some people's opinions, some of the most beautiful landscape to drive through.

We've got that Pacific Coast Highway, California Highway 1, that goes basically all along that coast. You can take that and just see stunning landscapes and different features and formations from kind of almost desert-like sands down in Southern California to rocky coasts and cliffs and beautiful trees and forests and all kinds of things that you might be able to see.

There really is a variety along that coastline that you would see as you're traveling up or down the Pacific Coast. That's one of my favorite things to do. I used to live, like I said, in Southern California.

I lived about eight years there in the Los Angeles area. Naturally, one of my favorite things to do when I lived in Los Angeles was to drive out of Los Angeles and go see other things in that state, because it wasn't my favorite place of the state, as you can imagine.

Driving along, whether north or south, going down to San Diego, beautiful landscape up there, taking trips up to San Francisco and beyond. There's just so much to see, and I love driving. That's a good thing, because with Canyon Ministries here, our offices are in Flagstaff, but the Grand Canyon is an hour and a half away.

Every time we're doing a tour, we're driving a three-hour round trip every day that we're going up to do tours. I don't mind driving. I like it. It lets you see the landscape and lets you have a lot of time to go through your thoughts and prayer and listen to a lot of books on tape.

Anyhow, looking at the California coastline, you do have a vast variety of different landscapes. Not just in geology, but there's a lot of different things regarding plants and animals and just all sorts of different things to see.

Again, tonight, we're not going to be able to cover every detail of it, but we'll cover a few different things. Beyond just speaking about the actual coastline coastline of where the water meets the sand or the rocks, I consider coastal geology to be not just right on the coast, but even things maybe a little ways inland from the coast.

There are fantastic mountain formations and things like that that we see that are considered that coastland environment, things that really almost these mountains that play into why we have the coast and why you have the type of environment and ecosystems that you might see on the Pacific coast.

I would consider coastal geology to be from the ocean to maybe 50, 60, maybe up to 100 miles inland. Basically, some of the areas that have to do with that coastland environment. There's just tons of stuff to see.

One of the big things, of course, you see as you're driving, for example, from where I live here in Arizona, if you're driving to the coast, you do go through some pretty good mountains. As you're driving up the coast, you can see some spectacular mountains.

I've been into Seattle a number of times and just seen some really awesome, spectacular mountains from between there and down to Portland area. I grew up in Colorado and used to seeing mountains and pretty familiar with mountains, but tell you what, the first time I flew into Seattle, we were flying by one of those big, massive mountains just right off the airplane.

I was just amazed because this thing is just massive prominence rising up and just right there next to the water. It was just so stunning. Coastal geology, I think, has a lot to do with not just the sand and the rocks by the water, but also what's a little bit inland.

Again, some of that to help shape the geology you might find on the coast. Speaking of these mountains, how do we see mountains form? That's one of the big questions that people oftentimes ask. Where do those big mountain ranges come from?

When you see the Cascades or you go down and you see mountains further south from there, where do these mountains come from? From our perspective, when it comes to a creation and flood geology perspective, we see a lot of those mountains and mountains throughout the world really as a result of the flood in Noah's day, by and large.

A lot of our major mountains that we see and are familiar with today, we believe were the product or result of these year-long flood processes or shortly thereafter. Something to think about when it comes to mountains, things like the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Appalachians, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, a lot of these mountains that we see and are familiar with today, we believe were formed during the flood.

Most of those probably pushed up and through flood waters. It helps us to understand when you study the geology around the coast and you see these mountainous formations along coastal regions, you get an understanding that during the flood, it's not simply just a mere water event.

This is not simply waters covering the earth, but during this year-long flood process, we would have volcanoes erupting around the planet. Again, we'd have earthquakes going off. We'd have tectonic forces.

We'd have a lot of stuff taking place. During the flood, we believe that the plates, many of our tectonic plates around the world were broken up and that during the flood, there's pretty good evidence in geology that during this flood that they were moving around.

They were jostling. They were shifting around. In some cases, they were colliding together. As they collided, they came together, in some cases, buckled and forced up huge major mountain ranges like the Himalayas, where you typically see two continental plates coming together as India comes slamming into Southeast Asia and they collide and push up.

In other cases, you have other plates doing different things. When we look out into the Pacific Ocean and we start to examine the plates that we have out there, we see geologists have put together their ideas of three to four major plates that you would see out there in the Pacific.

This map you see here, this is a little loose illustration of maybe what these plates would have looked like before. The continents are the shape they are now. Interestingly, when it comes to science and geology, truthfully, we do agree by and large with a lot of mainstream geology.

With the caveat, with the difference being mostly how quickly we would see things formed and maybe how recently we would say that they were formed. We do believe in things like plate tectonics. We do believe in things like the continents moving.

Instead of continental drift over millions of years of slow gradual movement like we see today, we would be talking more like continental sprint. Rapid movement, rapid changes. Big processes happening quickly because this year-long flood is such an impactful event that's taking place.

Again, kind of continental sprint. As these continents are coming together, again, they're colliding in train wreck-like collisions. They're buckling and forcing up these huge major mountain ranges. Today's present processes that we see of geology, slow gradual uplift and movement and separation, today's present processes I don't believe can explain necessarily what we would see happen in the past.

Because the past holds some pretty key big events and some really big things that we don't typically see happening today. Of course, you and I weren't there since the beginning in the past. What every geologist, what every scientist has to do when it comes to understanding the past is they have to either make inferences based upon what they observe in the present or they have to rely upon another source of authority or information.

Fortunately, we are given God's Word, the Bible, as a key eyewitness, if you will, a history book of the universe. We're given that as a source book to be able to understand some of those events of the past.

When you understand, again, what the Bible is really talking about, you realize that the flood that it describes in Genesis 6, 7 and 8 regarding Noah's Ark and Noah's Flood, you come to the understanding and realization that this flood is the largest major geological change that the world has seen before or since most likely.

This is a huge, huge event taking place. What we see are changes and shifts in tectonic plates, but again, not the slow gradual uplift of millions of years, more of a rapid and catastrophic. At the end of the flood, all that comes screeching to a halt for the most part, but we do still see some residual movement.

We still see some residual uplifts. We still see these plates moving together. By and large, I've been to plenty of presentations. I've been to some fantastic presentations from everyday secular geologists who don't agree with our perspective of creation or the flood or how recently things would have happened, but I've been able to go to these presentations and actually learn quite a bit from that perspective.

Really, truthfully, by and large, I look at it and say, you know what? I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except for the time and the speed and the mechanism. There's a lot in the standard geological process that we actually do agree with.

One of those things are plates. In this illustration, this model, you can see some three major plates that you would see that would be out there into the Pacific Ocean. Now, one of the major ones we want to talk about and focus on right here is this kind of Farallon plate that we see there.

This would have been a major plate that we believe was in the Pacific Ocean. We do believe that plates, again, they move. They sometimes push together. If they are continental plates, then they're going to push together, and they're going to have a hard time jostling one another.

But sometimes in the oceans, we have oceanic tectonic plates. What you would see is in the ocean that the ocean floor plates are typically more dense, and they are heavier material because they're made up of basalt.

The average density of basalt is about three grams per cubic centimeter, I believe it is. What you have there is a heavier, denser material, whereas on the continents, the average weight is about a granite, which is about 2 .7.

What happens is when you have heavy, denser basaltic plate material from the ocean bottom, when it comes in contact with the more light, buoyant coastal areas and where the continents are at, what's going to happen is the lighter material is going to float on top of it, and the heavier, denser material is going to go down and subduct and go down into the asthenosphere, and then pushing its way down where it starts to get in contact with the heat from the mantle and begins to liquefy.

That can do a whole lot of interesting things. When you look here at this Farallon plate, this shows us probably what things would have looked like before the flood stages. We don't know exactly what the arrangement of the continents were, but probably definitely different than we see today.

During the beginning of the flood, we believe, and during this year-long flood process, some of these plates were actually subducting, and they were going underneath one another. For example, the Esnagi plate would be subducting and going underneath where you see Japan.

That Farallon plate would have been subducting underneath what we call the North American plate. Today, pretty much most of that Farallon plate is completely gone. There are some trace members of it that we would see here and there, like little pieces of the Juan de Fuca.

That's a small section of it. We have the Cocos plate down to the south, and the Nazca plate that's down there by South America. Those are members of that whole plate. By and large, the Farallon plate is pushing, and it's coming in contact with the North American plate.

What happens is, to make these mountains, we have this mountain-building phase taking place right along the coastal areas. I'm sure a lot of you guys have noticed, but if you look at major coastlines, especially going down the entire west coast of the United States all the way down through the western coast of South America, you see some pretty big mountains.

We've got big, major mountain ranges going down all the way down to South America there. We have the Andes pushed up. What's happening are these plates are coming in. They are subducting. You can see here, heavier, more dense ocean crust material because it weighs more because it's mainly basalt.

It's actually coming in contact, and it's heavier, so it sinks down underneath the lighter granitic continental plate material. What's happening there is it's subducting. It's being pushed down. It's almost like a giant conveyor belt, if you will.

You've got material from the ocean floor that's moving. Maybe there could have been pre-flood islands out there that we have no trace of anymore. There could have been whatever was on the oceans at that time.

This giant conveyor belt is coming against and contacting and pushing against the continental crust. As the oceanic crust is pushing against there, it's even sometimes bringing in some material that many geologists call the accretionary stages or accretionary of continents.

Basically, imagine you've got a conveyor belt moving. Do you remember the old I Love Lucy TV show? When they were there, I think it was at the Chocolate Factory. They have all this coming by. I kept checking.

I kept pulling all these chocolates off of there and trying to figure out what to do. She's eating them nonstop. All these chocolates are going down the conveyor belt. Imagine if we had islands out there in the ocean or other subterranean, underneath-the-water landforms that are being carried on that conveyor belt.

They're not colliding with the west coast of the United States during this year-long flood. It's pushing material. It's accreting them onto the coastline areas. We actually have some stuff pushed together.

This subduction creates what we call the accretionary wedge. It's a push of all this material crumpling together on the surface. It's the lighter stuff that's scraping and getting pushed on, whereas the heavier, denser basaltic ocean crust is subducting down.

What's happening, though, is that the salt-heavy material goes down into the asthenosphere and starts to get liquefied down there. You start to warm it up because of the heat of the mantle, but also just the friction of these coming together.

That friction starts to create a melt zone. That material starts to dewater. It starts to lose the water it has with it. It starts to boil up as steam. We have this liquefied rock zone. Then you also have a lot of water contained within it.

Eventually, that heat and that pressure can start to force its way up through the continental crust and form many, many volcanoes. That's what we see with a lot of these major mountain ranges. A lot of these ranges have some big volcanic activity associated with them or places where mountains have been crushed up and crumpled up.

Even sometimes heat and pressure from this process is changing rock material, turning it into this metamorphic rock stage. The rock is undergoing this metamorphic change. If you remember from school in geology, all rocks around the world fall into one of three different classifications.

We have sedimentary rock. Typically, think of rocks like sediments, like glued together sand grains, things like sandstone and limestone and shale. We have sedimentary rocks. Then we have igneous rocks.

Those igneous rocks are rocks that have come up from these lavas and volcanoes and things like that. Igneous rock, like the word ignite, is a great way to think of it. We have igneous rocks. Then we have a third rock type called metamorphic rock.

Metamorphic rocks are rocks that have undergone a change by heat and pressure. Heat and pressure squeeze it, melt it, typically realigning the crystalline structure, making a much stronger rock in the end.

That usually is the product of heat and pressure. When you have these plates coming together, there's a lot of heat, there's a lot of pressure. It can actually change and transform those rocks. Metamorphic rocks.

Similar to a word we have often used, metamorphosis, which of course is the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. From the Greek to metamorphosis, to change in its nature or in its form. Which is a pretty neat word because the Bible actually uses that word to describe us.

How we are changed and transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. We are ourselves metamorphic in nature, you might say. We've been changed and transformed. Anyhow, when you're looking at coastal geology, we have all three of those major rock types represented that you see all over.

We have the sedimentary rocks, we have the igneous rocks, and we have those metamorphic rocks. And we believe a lot of that took place either during the beginning of creation. So when day three of creation, when God drew the water to one place where the dry land would appear.

We'd have a lot of movement, we'd have a lot of uplift, a lot of changing and all kinds of stuff. We'd also have a lot of erosion off the continents as the water's draining off. So we'd have a lot of sedimentary rocks formed then.

And then during the flood, we would again have tremendous changes happening for this year-long flood process. So we see a lot of that happening during this year-long flood, we believe. So during this time, we have major big volcanoes that are being thrust up.

And so again, liquefied rock from either melting heat down below, but especially from friction from these plates coming together. And so rising up, and so not only lava and magma coming out of volcanoes, but we have a lot of steam.

In fact, one of the biggest things coming out of volcanoes is not lava, but it's actually steam. And these big steam explosions that make these big, you know, free of magmatic explosions of volcanoes.

And so we see a lot of water vapor coming out of volcanic vents. And so again, a lot of that's associated with some of this water being pulled down through this whole process. Plate subducting as well as groundwater penetration down into those zones.

So you look at coastal geology, and we still see a lot of mountains made up of igneous and especially metamorphic rock. And we see a lot of volcanoes. And it's actually the very thing that scripture talks about as well regarding the flood.

You know, again, the flood was not just about a mere water event. This isn't simply water covering the earth, you know, filling it up like a bathtub, and then you pull the plug and let it drain away, and the water all disappears.

You know, the Bible again describes the flood as a major, huge, catastrophic event. And it's really a tectonic event too. During the flood, again, mountains, volcanoes, all kinds of stuff being formed.

And again, scripture gives us that indication as well too. Psalm 104 talks about the flood. And Psalm 104 verse 8 tells us that during this flood that mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels that God decreed.

So what we're looking at is during this year-long flood, we would have major mountains that are rising up. And so especially near the end of the flood, as the floodwaters are receding off the continents, we would have mountains that are being thrust up that are rising up from below.

And so we have valley floors that are being ripped open. We have a deepening of the ocean basins, we believe. And we have mountains that are rising, in some cases, to incredible heights across the continents.

Again, most of our major mountains, like the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Appalachians, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevadas, all those things we believe were formed either during the flood or shortly after that.

And again, most of that, again, triggered by the flood. And it also helps us to understand that when it comes to these mountains that we see, especially in these coastal regions, we don't necessarily need maybe as much water to flood the earth as what some people might think.

People look at things like the Himalayas, and you say, oh, the Himalayas are risen to incredible heights and 29 ,000 feet in elevation, right? You're telling me that floodwaters rose to 29 ,000 feet? And I say, no.

And they say, oh, well, then you either don't believe your Bible or the Bible's not true because it said all the mountains were covered by water. And I say, yes, it does. And then they look really confused.

Now, those mountains, I would say, were not formed before the flood, so therefore they were not covered to 29 ,000 feet by the floodwaters. They were formed during the flood. And so the pre-flood world probably did not have nearly as high mountains as what we see today, nor as deep an ocean basin even.

I think both were greatly increased during this year-long flood. Again, mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels that you decreed. That's what it talks about, about the processes. And we believe that happened during the end of this flood especially.

And so, again, we look at the coastal regions, especially there on the west coast, and you do see some pretty impressive ranges of mountains. You know, we have the Cascade Range, which you typically see not too far from the coast like you can see there.

So the Cascade Range, which goes, you know, all the way down from Washington through Oregon and into parts of Northern California. And so this mountain range, we believe, was part of this orogeny, which is really what we refer to as a mountain-building phase.

We kind of call those an orogeny. And so this is the result of these plates coming together, you know, Farallon Plate, the Juan de Fuca Plate, coming together, pushing together, we believe. But, again, not slow continental drift, but rapid movement.

And so the creationary phases of that taking place, adding material, crushing it together, sometimes pushing up. And then mountain ranges, and actually, if you follow the Cascade Range, there's a really nice ribbon kind of going right down.

There's many, many of these volcanoes. If you trace them out, they're actually in a perfect alignment. And it makes sense because that's where these plates are coming together and subducting. So right around that same melt zone, right where the plate is melting and kind of up and down north to south zone, this is where you're seeing these volcanoes kind of pop up.

And I found a neat picture, actually, earlier when I was looking for Cascade ones. And this is kind of an old vintage picture, but I love the look of it. Fantastic mountains that you can see there in the Cascade Range.

So you're looking here. The first one kind of closest to you there, that's called Three-Finger Jack. Behind it, you can see Mount Jefferson and then Mount Hood in the distance there. And so you can actually see a fourth one if you look closely way back there.

And there's actually one even closer to the view to the left. But these mountains are basically all kind of lined up. And so this coastal geology range, you can see some spectacular volcanoes. And, of course, and especially, you know, following creation and stuff, I'm sure people are very familiar with one of the very famous volcanoes near that coastal range.

And that, of course, is Mount St. Helens. And so, you know, as we know, Mount St. Helens erupted May 18th of 1980. And this is actually not that event right here. This is actually after that. There was a smaller kind of little lava dome to begin to form inside of it.

So if you actually go to Mount St. Helens, and I've been up there a couple different times. If you look at it, you've got the big, you know, basin caldera in the middle. And you actually have like another little volcano.

So it's actually if you look at it today, you kind of consider it a little mini volcano within a much bigger volcano. Now, that mountain has erupted multiple times in the past. And, of course, the last big eruption was May 18th of 1980 when it erupted.

And that whole front side just kind of slumped down from an earthquake that kind of broke the rocks loose. And it kind of like, you know, when you shake up a bottle of soda and you remove the top, it just sprays out.

And so kind of that's what happened. You have all this material. When it was sliding off from that earthquake, the pressure inside that was being built up now just kind of exploded out. And it kind of came out unexpectedly to one direction.

Instead of just kind of shooting straight up, it actually came out toward the direction of many people that were actually viewing it and watching it and recording even scientists. So I'm sure there are plenty of talks out there that you've all heard on Mount St. Helens.

But, again, it's part of that coastal geology range and pretty spectacular little feature that we have there. I say little. I shouldn't say little. It's actually big. And, again, this is much bigger than what I've what I ever expected.

If you guys have never seen Mount St. Helens, really encourage you to go see it for yourselves. And I've seen many pictures. And, boy, tell you what, this thing is so much bigger than what it looks like in pictures.

You know, it's like I tell people Grand Canyon, you know, pictures don't do it justice. And the same thing is true for Mount St. Helens. Again, it's a spectacular place to see and to study, you know, rapid geological processes and things that could happen pretty quickly and even how the landscape could recover quickly.

So along that whole region, we have some pretty spectacular geology. And a lot of that we can look at in relation to things like, you know, the global flood and maybe evidence of that flood or evidence of what rapid, you know, big changes can happen from big events, you might say.

You know, catastrophic processes that produce pretty big events. So along that area, you actually have something a little bit to the south. So as we're kind of taking our journey along the, you know, coastal geology, we're kind of starting up here in the north, you know.

We're going to work our way north all the way down to the south where you guys live down there, Terry. So we'll kind of work our way from north to south. But kind of looking, working our way down the coast, you know, we've got the spectacular Cascade Range.

We've got some volcanoes like you see here. We have another interesting feature that you can see if you go down near Portland area. And so I've got the opportunity to kind of drive through here and explore this landscape.

And we have the spectacular Columbia River Gorge.

Nate, if you're showing something about Oregon, I'm still seeing Mount St. Helens.

It's still Mount St. Helens, yep.

Oh, okay.

I haven't got to there yet.

Okay.

Yep.

So we do have, you know, this Columbia River Gorge, which goes down from there a little bit further south, you can find. And pretty spectacular thing. So it goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But if you go further back, you can actually see as it goes through many valleys and this whole landscape.

Now, this whole region goes all the way to the Pacific, goes all the way to the coast. But it traces its way back quite a ways to the interior. So it goes quite a ways back. And in fact, geologists now, you know, they believe that this whole valley, most of what you're seeing, the most, you know, dramatic portions of what you're seeing here, were formed from a catastrophic spill of, you know, a big lake system that was basically back there, all the way back into Montana, where we have this big Lake Missoula area.

And so this whole thing was studied, especially going all the way back until about 1923. A guy by the name of J. Harlan Bretz, who had kind of surveyed this landscape, looked at it. And he was told by many people that these were valleys.

And he looked at this whole landscape and said, this doesn't look like a typical standard valley. This actually looks like a channel, like a channelized region. In other words, to carve a channel, you need some kind of, you know, typical water flow for the most part.

And so he's looking at these massive channeled valleys, nowadays called the channeled scablands. And he looked at it and said, boy, this looks as if there was a tremendous amount of water that was spilling through here all the way to the Pacific Ocean, carving out these massive valleys and carving all kinds of things like big waterfalls, like dry falls that we see in the Grand Coulee region, which you kind of see here.

And that Grand Coulee basically is showing where there was a massive big lake system, Lake Missoula, that they believe actually spilled through an ice dam, kind of burst through an ice dam. And this all this water came together and began spilling through, topping over different areas.

And as it went through where the Grand Coulee region is, it actually started to spill over kind of a cliff edge, you know, where there was a waterfall, they would think. And this force and this amount of water actually had so much erosion happening during this big spill event, it caused that waterfall to continue eating backwards from that, you know, the force of water from this kind of Nick Point erosion, creating this backwards retreating waterfall.

And it actually retreated, they estimate, 20 miles. So going back 20 miles worth of cutting the cliff edge from this big spill of massive, you know, lake system. But it goes all the way. And so many geologists believe that the Columbia River Gorge, the big features of it, most of that was actually carved by some of these big spills.

And so as you go and travel through that region, you see and you can study some of this coastal geology all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And a beautiful landscape out there, by the way. If you guys haven't got a chance to drive up to Portland and check out the Columbia River Gorge and some of the areas up there, spectacular, beautiful views.

There are some really beautiful waterfalls of Multnomah Falls. We got a chance to go up there. We went one time, though, in December. And I'll tell you what, the wind coming through that valley, that gorge was so cold.

It may have been some of the coldest I've ever been in my life. It's just something different about, you know, when you're near the coast and it's cool temperatures and it's cool because of the water.

Humidity kind of works both ways. Not only does it make, you know, things feel hotter, but it makes things feel colder. And that's not me. I was raised, I like to say, high and dry. So I kind of grew up in the southwest area and where it's higher elevation and very, very dry air.

So when I was up there and I was surprised how cold it was, but beautiful landscape. Encourage you guys to get out there. Now, the neat thing about this whole study of the Columbia River Gorge, Lake Missoula, Channel Scablands, this whole theory that Harlan Bretz had kind of proposed was he was coming at it for the first time kind of by himself.

And he had so many detractors in standard geology that just kind of said, there's no way any of this makes sense. And they were trying to laugh him out of the room. And he kept trying to push and push and push and try to share that this is a big, big flood event.

And basically people were laughing him out of the room. Oh, the big flood. Yeah. What are you talking about? Like Noah's flood? And, you know, he wasn't even talking about Noah's flood necessarily. He was simply saying, look at this landscape.

If you study it, it shows that there's a, there was a big event that took place for this big feature. And of course, in those days, most geologists were only looking at slow, gradual processes, only looking at, you know, slow uniformitarianism.