- [Narrator] What does it mean to be curious?

For my students, curiosity creates opportunities for a bigger and brighter future.

(light upbeat music) (light ambient music) - Well, I don't know, have you been to Arizona before in the Grand Canyon and these buttes and this landscape that's carved by rivers, Colorado River, Grand Canyon, this is central Washington.

The bedrock is different, but there are elements of the desert southwest here.

But there's one important difference.

These valleys don't have any rivers in 'em.

(instrumental music) (instrumental music continues) This is an ideal place to learn about the channeled scab lands.

I mean, there it is, basalt cliffs, channel, valley bottom, no water, dry channels.

Like what's the story?

It's an ice age flood story.

And here's a map of Washington during the Ice Age.

So during that ice age time between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago, there were major floods of water pouring over the channels of eastern Washington.

This place was hammered by water moving 60 miles an hour, big blocks of ice floating at the top, icebergs stones being tumbled along the base, and that hurricane of ice age flood water hit this place repeatedly.

(instrumental music) All right, so Drumheller channels and ice age floods.

If you're aware that these crazy floods came through here, maybe the first question is why wouldn't the floods just skim right over the top of the bedrock, like if it was granite or metamorphic rock?

And the key answer is.. Basalt here is the bedrock.

Look at this, these amazing columns, these amazing vertical cracks.

These are big pencils that are stacked side by side.

And so the water coming through here is gonna hydraulically lift these columns up and out.

And the resulting damage is almost at the snap of a finger.

Columnar Basalt, easy for the water to sweep away plucking one after another.

(light instrumental music) Drumheller Channels is a place where you can get the big scale and the small scale.

And so here are the tops of these beautiful columns.

This particular flow has columns that are only about 50 feet high, and they are across the way as well.

So these amazing cracks are kind of just right scale for us to get up on top, get down below, see across the way, and it's one of the best places to be able to put these missing columns back where they belong.

Get those Ticonderoga pencils and get 'em back in the box.

Get 'em all bunched together.

We had that here once.

We don't have many more.

A bunch of them are gone.

Ice age floods did it.

(instrumental music) Undeveloped and preserved as the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge.

The Drumheller Channels offer a sanctuary to many birds and mammals.

(instrumental music continues) Left largely untouched by the surrounding agriculture industry.

Walking through the channels is like traveling back in time.

Walking in Drumheller channels.

It's exactly like it was in 1922, like a hundred years ago.

Jay Harland Bretts and his grad students walking on this landscape, the first geologist to actually study this place carefully map every one of these buttes, basins, all these different bench levels with the Columnar river basalt.

Now, what was the big message?

Those papers in the 1920s said the only way to make these landscapes is to have catastrophic floods of water stripping away a lot of the basalt, stripping away the top soil, and leaving this bizarre landscape.

It's still here a hundred years later, waiting for you.

(instrumental country music)