July 14, 2010 at 4:50 PM by Site
 When one travels on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, one travels through countless generations of human experiences on those rivers and the surrounding lands. Events and settings now long gone but somehow remembered in the rocks and fossils left behind, as if Mother Nature was leaving her story behind in a book.
It is widely accepted that man has inhabited North America for at least 13 thousand years. It is more than likely this number is much greater somewhere between 14 and 20 thousand years at best, based on current dating methods and some inconclusive evidence in South America. Imagine being amongst the first generations of Americans on the continent over ten thousand years ago. What did it look like? What was life like?
This leaves even for the most conservative dreamer, a North America that is widely inconceivable by our current society. What would a typical day have looked like for an early American walking along what is now the Columbia River Gorge to the Pacific Ocean? To begin much more of the continental shelf would have been exposed. Sea level would have been several hundred feet lower due to some of the oceans water being locked up in massive continental glaciers, during our last ice age. What is now our modern coastline would have been a dry and arid grassland much colder than the African Serengeti but very similar in the animals that roam there. This grassland would have extended many miles out into what is now the Pacific Ocean.
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Tags: Columbia&SnakeRiver
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