Chanticleer Point

The Cascade Range formed thirty-five million years ago as plates of the Earth's crust collided. Then, twenty million years ago, molten basalt gushing from cracks near the Idaho border covered eighty thousand square miles and shifted the Columbia River north to its present location. During the last Ice Age, melting ice dams in Montana released massive floods that scoured this canyon perhaps one hundred times, with waters so high they surged over the top of Crown Point. Helped by these floods, the Columbia cut through layers of stone faster than her smaller tributaries, creating the greatest concentration of high waterfalls in North America. Lava no longer flows to laminate this landscape, and the Ice Age is long past, but the Gorge remains dynamic as landslides continue to move mountains and tiny crystalline droplets caught by winter's freeze crack the cliffs, etching another season into the Columbia's Gorge.

Oregon · United States