CWU's Nick Zentner hiking in the Yakima River Canyon near Ellensburg, Washington. Recorded on Saturday, July 11, 2020. Hiking footage plus brief discussion of entrenched meanders, landslides, etc.
Try the Yakima Canyon some night, during the dark of the moon. From river level, there is only a swath of the sky visible. The ridges block out light from Ellensburg and Selah. If it is October or November, there is little traffic. The stars are overwhelming.
Thank you Nick, I've been binge watching your "chalkboard lectures" and have now been watching your more recent, "Nick on the fly" uploads. I appreciate all that you're sharing and teaching! loving and completely in awe of the landscapes! what a beautiful and magnificent world we live in! I'm hooked on geology!
Howdy Nick, I found your talks a few years ago, and through them (and RU-vid's algorithms) I found a while slew of other 'talks'. From the Royal Tyrrell museum, to the World Science Festival, and many others. But your talks, and your live-streams have especially rekindled my love of learning. I just wanted to take the time and share a heartfelt Thank You. You're a grade A goofball, and I love you too.
Love the early morning views and the geology. Yakima River is lovely
4 года назад
Such a beautiful area. I've not hiked here but have driven Canyon Road (821) several times. One of my favorite drives! Interesting to learn that the river was here first! Thanks Nick!
What a beautiful landscape. On the vertical stripes, I'm reminded of a lecture by Dr David Rogers where he said springs often beep out where descending ground water encounters an aquaclude, like a shale seam, and the water moves horizontally. No shale seams here, but I'll bet those are ephemeral spring heads, and that's eroding and carrying rock down the slope.
Thanks for doing these short field trips Nick. Gives good context to your live streams. Yes, notification is coming by email when you post. I look forward to what you will do next!
hi mr Zentner and greetings from Greece..im a great fan of your geological presentations..i ve watched most of them here on youtube and I feel like I live in Washington despite I ve never been there in my life..because of you now I have a great interest in Greece s geology,and as you probably know my country s geology is very interesting and still active!
Just missed you! My wife and I were returning from Harstine Island (near Shelton) to Denver via Boise, on the 10th and 11th. We drove the Yakima Canyon on July 10th. One day! Sheesh. After watching your Ghost Volcanoes video, we made a point of driving US12 from Yakima on to the Shelton area (including its co-routed I-5 and US 101). In all my years as a geologist in Washington, I missed this area. Thanks for inspiring our choice of route! (FWIW we're considering Ellensburg as our retirement location.)
These videos are so beautiful. I think you are right about social media driving the trend you notice in outdoors recreation, but I think it's a complex knot of social media driving desire to do alike, and on the flip-side a desire to temporarily escape the digital world, as well as a desire to share alike with others and send social signals - this itself is further connected to the rising trend of healthy living and also the trend of sharing travel experiences on social media, all in all signifying youth, excitement, fun, health, vigor, novelty, spontaneity, wholeness, awareness, etc. (for example a big part of generating online dating profile content for young people that signals that they are good potential partners). In general it feels like a complicated interplay of wanting to feel a part of what others are doing and not miss out, and to consume new experiences, and to also feel the benefit of escaping the competitive world of digital content for a while - if one can do that and send some positive, on-trend social signals and generate good 'content' in doing so, there are multiple benefits.
Thank you Nick for another informative video. If I were closer to you I would definitely sign up for a course or three from you. You would have a 70-year-old fart asking lots of questions. Have a great day and keep educating me :)
Thanks Nick, I've learned a lot from you. Turns out the geology of my home area of SW Oregon is kind of complicated. I'm doing a bit of studying to understand it. Was this some kind of plot to get me to learn on my own?
Sorry I missed this livestream. Very beautiful scenery and an excellent place to hike. Yakima River reminds of a river here in the Bay Area called Alameda Creek which cuts through the East Bay Hills of the Diablo Range. It's similarly meandering inside a pretty steep canyon, and it has the same origin story in that the hills postdate the river.
Thanks for creating this channel Nick. I've watched all of the videos you put out through CWSU's channel. You left me wanting more. Now I'm getting it!
I love the format. I drive 200 plus miles a day in Cali. In one day I went from the east bay to the montaray peninsula to Redding and the foot of the mighty Cascades with Lassen and Shasta in view. Watching geology change on the fly is amazing. Maybe a podcast with another geologist traveling to a destination discussing the features non the way....
Not a live stream; no "signal". Nick has to record these hikes and then post them on RU-vid. BTW, if you can't hear the sound in places, turn on closed captions and you'll get some of what Nick is saying.
Nick Id love to see you make a vid where you narrate as you fly your ultra light plane over the best places youve discovered. Thank you for all that you do for us Sir. Youre a rock star in my book.
Nick, you should do more on the history of the Columbia River. My uncle took some Geology at the UofW in the early 70's and he told me that Grays Harbor and Willipa Bay have a connection to the Columbia River system. The Columbia dumping into both places. Coastal uplift moving the mouth to it's present location. At least my understanding according to how he explained it to me.
Reminds me of the hills surrounding Naches. Grandparents lived that and Dad would take me hiking in the hills during summer months. Snakes, horned lizards, sage brush all great memories.
Thanks Nick! No audio on the last 9 minutes, but great video! I’ve spent a lot of time in WA over the years, all of it in the Cascades. Can’t wait to hit the eastern portion of WA which I mistakenly wrote off. Stay safe and keep these coming!
I so enjoy your geology lessons which I view on OPB. The Yakima River was especially interesting. I have driven that road many times and hiked the Ridge above with no awareness of the geology.
It must be pretty cool, to be a scientist and be able to appreciate the mechanism for what you are viewing. Sure it's beautiful to look at. But knowing why, is like icing on the cake. That's what drew me to science. Oh, we tubed the Yakima from the irrigation dam to the orchards in Yakima with our Yakima friends several times in the early 80's. So awesome. So cold! I wondered then, how the heck the river cut through these canyons. The uplift must be slow, so as not to cut off the river and force it North. Gary Rolf, B.S. Physics, Whitworth College, '81. Did you know Ed Olson at Whitworth? Geology/Physics. He's wrote the Carbon-14 article in Brittanica.
Beauty area. How the desert combines with the green below and river. Oh. I was praying you didn’t slip! Be careful. P.S. The iPhone does has the best a picture and video quality. I take all my pictures and videos using my iPhone X.
I hope you can continue the Yakima River jaunt. It is one of the most beautiful and interesting canyons to drive thru (almost makes going to eastern Washington worth it). Thanks!
I've always wanted to go back in time and do some hydralic mining on the Boyleston Mountains, where the train tunnel (Cascades to Palouse trail in the latest renaming) goes through the Mts, and lower it down about 500 feet to let the cold air that forms in the valley in the winter out into the Columbia Basin.
I have to ask Nick, starting around 2:07 the hill off to the right in the frame is marked by a distinct division of gray/gold coloring. Is this a sunlight effect or something more? You are my Yoda of geology and every single post I can find of yours is like discovering a gem of great value. Thank you.
Geeezus Professor Zentner, from 7:25 on, it was a bit stressful for me to watch, thinking you were going to forget where you were, step back too far and go right off the ridge. Beautiful views and fascinating science though!
I don't look at anything the same anymore Nick. Was watching a sailboating video, they were getting kicked out of the marina. In the background it was obvious the hill had sloughed off, exposing the bedrock above where houses were now built. 1:13 here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_oizGAEAfYM.html upper left corner.
I thoroughly enjoy these explorations, however could you please pin point on google maps where you are filming. I can guess and get close but never know exactly where you are, thanks.
At about 8:30, east of, and on the face of the landslide is a splotch of green plant growth. I am wondering what is the source of water that supports that plant life. Can you hike there and discover and display the water source for the plant life ?
Are the horizontal lines that line the canyon walls caused by cattle grazing? That was the answer that my geo-morphology professor gave me for them along the Clearwater River in Idaho.
Are those "pencils on their side" columnar basalt structures? I thought they only formed vertical. Does that mean that the land has rotated 90 deg since emplacement?
@@beachbum200009 I drive all over this area and see the basalt columns horizontal, from the side they look like a log cabin, and on the end like pencils, often in a fan shape, great example of it in the Tieton river andesite- fun for rock climbing too. My understanding is it is the way the lava is cooling, not lifted sideways ?
@12:38 the horizontal columns, what about them being broken off and laid over by the landslide visible just to the left as you pointed out seconds later.
Spent today filming the Columbia at the US /Canada border. At first glance it appears the many flood steps end almost at the border. Is that the lower end of a long past series of lakes?
Professor, I'm originally from Brooklyn NY and the first time i traveled across the US to California i noticed that the majority of the mountains were devoid of trees just like the hills in this video. is that because of the basalt rocks underneath or is it because of the altitude?
The lack of trees in the video is probably because eastern Washington is dry. It's a very different story west of the Cascades, where everything is wet and green, and the forest even climbs up the steep sides of some mountains. I suspect when mountain sides in western Washington are naked of trees, it's usually because of soil erosion: the terrain is too steep to hold onto the soil. We're probably the only state that has a rain forest and a desert.
I just watched the 1981 movie, Mount Saint Helens. So much better than Dante’s Peak and that horrible Tommy Lee Jones movie. Say what you will but they used to have better scripts back then. I am from Tucson, Arizona but I have always been obsessed with Washington volcanos. I know you have covered this ground in past lectures, but it would be interesting if you could give us a backstory that we have never heard. Art Carney was a great Harry Truman.
So, a non-geological question. I had an uncle, one of my father's brothers, who lived and worked in Yakima most of his adult life until he passed away c. 1960. My father also spent some time working in the area and another brother, also relocating from the family home in the Midwest, settled down in the Portland area c. WWII where he married and raised his family. He passed away around 1990. My family and I visited my uncle and his family in Portland several times when I was a child and teenager. I always heard "Yakima" pronounced as "Yak-uh-MAW" and not with the shortened final syllable. Has the pronunciation changed over the past 45 years?
My family moved to the Seattle metro area in the late '60s when I was a baby, and I've lived here ever since. I've usually heard (and always said) "yak-i-maw" with none of the syllables accented much; if anything, the first syllable might get a little extra weight. There's probably not much difference between this pronunciation, and the pronunciation you're describing. If I'm not mistaken, Nick grew up in Wisconsin, and he may impart a bit of Midwest flavor to the pronunciation.
My relatives moved there in the early ‘40’s and grew apples. They used to pronounce it yak-e-ma, they were originally from Oklahoma. But my immediate family pronounced it yak-ah-maw. I know we always went through the Yakama Indian land to get there from Oregon when driving up from California so I’m not sure if that’s what influenced how we pronounced it from theirs. I think people that live there may say it both ways. It’s not the really rural area I knew as a kid anymore, I’m 64. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakama .
@@profd65 Thanks. I grew up in Montana, but went to college in Wisconsin myself, and I'm not hearing a lot, if any, of a "normal" Wisconsin brogue (there are, of course, several such dialects) in his speech. So who knows?
