Episode #112 Teton Dam & Bonneville Flood Breakouts / Snake River Canyons Idaho
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Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Valley with WGU. With courses available online 24/7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hello and welcome back. Cosmographia, a Randall Carlson podcast. We're going to do it again. We got normal guy Mike with us this time. Welcome back, Mike. And hello, Randall. Hello, Brad. Hello, Mike.

Randall, Brad, good to see you guys after such a long hiatus. It's been years. It's been years, hasn't it? Well, it's been about a year, I guess. I think it's been just over a year since we had Mike with us, yeah. The last one was back at the end of October, 111, we did with Jordan and Johanna.

Uh-huh. Yep. So, let's do it again here. We got a tour coming up. Area behind me is one of the stops out on the Snake River in southern Idaho. So, we got a couple things we're going to talk about that. And Randall has been writing probably 15 years ago. I don't know, man. When did you write that stuff about the Teton Dam failure from 1976? Yeah.

We're going to go out and see that too. It's a bit of a dog leg, but we want to get you there. I've been there and flying the drone. So I've got some photos up hoping we'll get a chance to show it tonight and let you talk about the Teton Dam failure in relation to our tour coming up. Yeah, the Teton Dam, just to give a little context, was the last great monumental dam failure in America. And there was the last monumental dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers in

And there has been not an attempt to build that scale of a dam since that failure. And we're going to look at that and kind of talk about why it failed and what we have learned from that with respect to floods, breakout floods, because some of the lessons to be derived from the study of that event are,

go directly to giving insight into even the bigger events that we're always talking about, the mega floods. Because in a way, it was kind of its own mega flood, you know, and it caused some serious damage. We're going to look at that. But there's been a lot of other things going on. Yeah, I was just going to say something really surprising happened, and that should be applied to the Cordilleran mega floods also, and we'll get into that. Yeah.

Where did a lot of the volume of the water go after that lake busted through the dam on the Teton River? So, yeah, get to that after the break. We may sprinkle in some stuff. Like I said, I've got some photos from my drone. But, yeah, you want to catch up, anything been going on? I know you did a sacred geometry course back at the end of February, and you've been doing squaring the circle. Yeah.

started the big picture podcast so yeah staying busy and that new studio you got there yeah yeah well that was you know had to make the you know made the investment so gotta gotta you know make it pay for itself but you know that was the whole point was to build a studio and then to be able to start putting out content and stimulate some interest and some um

you know, grow the network of people that are interconnecting, that's forming around alternative paradigms of our world, which is important to happen right now. We might mention that Russ and Kyle are now in Turkey. Are they in Turkey now? Have they left Egypt? They've gone to Turkey? They finished up the Egypt tour, had that conference going on in between Egypt

They had some off days there and then went to Turkey. It might be the last day of it, actually. They've announced they're going with Uncharted X-Men down to Peru at the end of the year. Overlaps the time we're going to Azor, so I'm not going to be able to do both of those. That's awesome. That's definitely really high on my list, get down to Peru. Yeah, I know. It's high on my list as well. Yeah, those guys are staying real busy.

We miss them. I guess at some point, though, they need to take a break to earn some money, don't they? It turns out that they're independently wealthy and we just didn't know it. Well, they made one hell of an album. I tell you what, that was really, really impressive music. And we went down for the Eclipse to Texas and they performed as a band.

through the whole procession record and, uh, really impressive, really awesome. And, uh, I think they've done well selling, selling their music and, uh, Kyle's Kyle sent me a half a dozen songs, uh, already putting together for the next one. So yeah, they're, they're a rock and roll band, man.

Well, okay. I know there's a lot of rock and roll bands out there and I really liked their music and I miss that we didn't have their music for the intro. Unless that's something we can slide in there later, right? Oh, it's certainly going to be added in. But yeah, we got to the point where Kyle would just play that to kind of set the mode and get Russ to do the timely intro.

Yep, we missed that. That was good for 108 episodes. 108, so does that mean this is 109? No, we did one with Chuck. We did one with Johanna and Jordan. So this is 112. This is 112. 112, uh-huh. Ba-bam, yeah. Just after the full moon here. A lot of astronomical, astrological stuff going on. I've definitely paid a lot more attention to that in the past year or so.

the effects of being at the Monroe Institute last summer. Oh, really? Yeah. Definitely. I meant to ask you about that. What's the kind of having an effect and penetrating the things that went on there? I imagine so. Yeah. So right, right after that, well, not right after that, but

And, yeah, just got deeply back into my Qigong and was meditating more and walking and exercising. And I'd sit out on the railroad tracks there behind my place in Marshall and watch the river move around as the water level went up and down. And just, you know, just really slowed the pace from the craziness that is the modern world, right? It was just really slowing down. And then the flood gushed through.

Yeah. That was a major supplanting of all those habits. That was a major disruptor, wasn't it? Yeah, so I didn't do any of that stuff again for three months as I was dealing with that. So getting back into that. But yeah, one thing that I learned soon after was how it was. Well, we talked about this in one of the podcasts, or at least I brought it up, that it was one plutonic year since the birthing of America. Oh. 248 years.

And that just kind of struck a chord with me that that was interesting, you know, learning a little bit more about what the planets represent and, you know, the mass effects on us as a whole, not necessarily just an individual and what you're going to do, though. I'm trying to see where that applies also. But, yeah, the turmoil and things that are happening with the election, it was right then, all the buildup to that. And, yeah, right as...

Pluto hit the spot where it was when 76, you know, America was, was formed. So yeah, that, that kind of nudged me or kicked me into that direction. So I'm listening to a lot of kind of stuff like that. And yeah, definitely want to be more aware of the motions in the sky. Right. That was like the most important thing for our ancestors for the long period of, of our species. Right. Yeah.

Well, we need to work some of that into our Bonneville tour. Well, we are. We are. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We're going to be out at the Bruno Gorge. Oh, wow. Down near the dam or the dunes. I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we're going to, we're going to have some nighttime sky viewing for sure in a, in a really dark place. Yeah. You know what I remember about the, our visit to the Bruno, uh, do Bruno Gorge, uh,

Several things, but what do you remember? Well, what I remember that was most impressive to me was as we're coming up, we're seeing that bank of clouds, right? And it was like almost serpent-like blank bank of clouds and then realized that the clouds...

were condensing over the gorge. It was almost like you had the gorge below, and then you had this cloud, sinuous type of cloud, following the gorge. I thought that stuck with me. I definitely remember that. It matched the shape of the canyon. Yes. Would that be... The edge of the cloud mimicked the shape. That would be because...

Okay. Because I'm, I'm okay. I'm guessing this would be the explanation. It's the gorge. It was how, I mean, it was enormously deep where we were at seven, 800 feet deep right there, right there. And it gets deeper than that. Doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So maybe the explanation is that because it's, it's cooler down there. So you've got this cool air. And if, if there's air moving down the gorge through the Canyon and it, it, um,

you know, displaces cool air that's already there. Now that moves up into the moist, warmer atmosphere. I mean, ordinarily you think that cool air would sink, which it would, unless there are air currents moving, which, which is possible. We know that, that, that is can happen that you've got these air currents moving through the gorge. Well, then it would explain to me why that cool air that's being forced upward then into the warmer air would condense. Right.

I don't know if that's the explanation or not. I'm just totally speculating here, but there is obviously an explanation. Yeah. Meteorologists could explain that to us, but yeah, it was near sundown, right? So it was cooling off already and then the sun would go behind the cloud and that would change the temperature quickly. Yeah. Combination of all those factors, but that definitely stuck with me as you say that. And the other thing was that eagle that flew by and just kind of

turned its head and stared at us as we were just standing at the rail looking down into this deep chasm. Was there a rail there? Was there a rail? Well, it was pretty abused. Maybe not at that right spot where the eagle flew by. But yeah, I was there

Pat went with me last year on the way to the Gorge Tour to check it out again, and they have upgraded it like three years ago. There's new sidewalks and gravel parking and the signs that we were, you know, this was 2000, right? This was 25 years ago we went out there, Randall. It's pretty crazy to consider that. That wasn't 2002? No.

No, Bonneville was 2000. Wow. So it kind of got civilized in the interim. Well, partly. But yeah, I remember there was that old beat up sign and we drove past it and it said, because it's a gunning range, right? There's a nearby Air Force base there at Mountain Home, south of Boise. And it was like, you know, objects may fall from the sky. And we're like, shoot.

Should we go any farther here? No, don't go right into the guttery range. It's not an active range anymore. Large explosions may be occurring all around you. That's what the sign said. It's really a beautiful sight now. So, yeah, we're definitely going to go out there. And, you know, that may be at least one of our star gazing nights there. Yeah, well, when we do the weather permitting, of course. Yeah. Well, my order's in.

Yeah, the Bruno Canyon. That was impressive. And so I think that that's a very interesting how that fits into the whole story, which it definitely does. I mean, and what's the other one? I've never been able to learn how to pronounce Owyhee. There's a partner canyon to Bruno that's just as deep, I think. Yeah, a little farther to the west. Yeah, they're coming out of right at the northern Nevada border there. Yeah, yeah.

So it was a south to north directed flow. Correct, yes. Yeah, I could probably find that. Yeah, that sounds familiar, but lots of more vowels than consonants, so it's hard to say. Right. Yeah, they've actually got a new... That's another thing that's gone up since we were out there. They've got a little center there at the park at Bruno Dunes for... There's not a...

or an observatory. Maybe it's just an observatory, but it's pretty small. But yeah, they've got like a classroom out there, but it's definitely windy. Uh-huh, yeah. So yeah, we're thinking about trying to set something up, but yeah, as always, it's a pretty full itinerary. So that was one thing that's kind of gotten squeezed, but we'll be out under the stars on our own without having to be led by someone at that particular park.

Okay. Give us some flexibility. So I did get up the Google map here. I think it might be cool to take a look at it. Let's see what the paper stuff, man. I still look at my benchmark maps. Yeah, I know there. Yeah. And it's pretty easy to pick out where we were. Yeah. Let's see here. So we've got, it's two creeks that come together.

uh oh jar bridge the jarbage jarbage river that's one of them and then the other one oh hot springs bench there's a beach that's interesting how do you get across the canyon is the so this is the i think this is you were saying there's a whole another uh another gorge to the west is what i was thinking not not two that come together to form the bruno

I think the Oahe, if I'm saying that right, this might be it over here. Let's see. No, Salmon Falls Creek. Because we never made it to the Oahe, but it's there. It's one of these. So then, yeah, these are two creeks that come together. And then where they come together, that's the Bruno. And there's the Bruno sand. Let's see, the Birds of Prey area. Yeah, the dunes. Well, what are you looking for? Well, I'm trying to...

figure out what is the original erosion that cut this channel. Well, there's Jarbridge Peak up there, so that's giving the name to that branch of the river. And look here, Matterhorn. Let's look at what that looks like. Well, it's not quite as impressive as the Matterhorn in Switzerland. I was going to say that's Switzerland, yeah. Well, not quite. Not quite. Yeah, Nevada's somewhere we haven't really explored too much. That's...

It's true. So we're getting the headwaters then are in these, this mountain range here. Uh, and yes, I've looked up the, the name of this mountain range and it escapes my mind, but I look at there. It seems to be a lot of hot Springs around here. Murphy hot Springs. We won't get that far South. Um, that's down in it. So that's like,

camping trip days yeah i think it's a blm land so uh you can request to set up your camp out there we we saw a woman in a van that was just kind of set up across across the way on on one of the one of the bends in the river bruno canyon bridge all right so check this out we won't get down here will we probably not wouldn't be enough time

I don't know. We're talking extra days already. I don't know. That bridge looks a little suspicious to me. A little rickety, yeah. It's not over the river. It's over a creek. You get into the river, you pass. So you would think you'd probably not want to haul a tour bus full of tourists across that bridge. No, the tourists better haul the van.

So I noticed somebody has built a little barricade out of the cobbles here to prevent tragedy from happening. But yeah, so this is part of the... So where were we? All right. You got to go a good ways north there. Okay. See that big arc right there? Here? Right there. Yep. That's where the overlook is. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep. That's impressive. That's impressive.

Let's see here what we got. And it's going to be May, so we're going to have some color in there when we were there last year. Yeah, it was quite green and vibrant. It wasn't just brown, burn-up desert. So we're going to see that again hopefully in May coming up. Yeah, really, we're at a month. Wow, okay. So yeah, you can see how the canyon is sinuous. And so that impressive cloud formation, that was the thing. I'd forgotten about the eagle. Yeah.

But now that you mentioned him, I remember him now. He was just kind of gliding in and hanging out, wasn't he? Yeah, just turned his head over and just kind of stared at it as he coasted by. All right, this is my joint. Who are these guys? And then the Dune State Park right there at the top there, you saw the lake and the little... Okay, and another hot springs. There are a lot of hot springs here.

Hot Spring Cemetery, cemetery. Okay. Seems to go hand in hand with basalt. Yeah. Okay. So here comes the river. Notice it's just become sort of a, look at all these cutoff meanders.

So, okay, so what you got here is a big layer of sediment, soft sediment, that was probably laid down. This is all the, you know, the sand and small gravel and stuff that was excised from the formation of the Bruno Canyon. And it's all splayed out here. You see the flat valley floor. And then what happens here?

We have a little, do we have a dam down here? Yeah, there's a dam to the west there. Yeah. Okay. So it winds around and then we get back to the snake. Boy, there's some interesting landscapes in here. Yeah. We're going to drive across several of them. Yes, we are. So as we've covered and talked about fairly in depth is that, you know, this whole Canyon here, all of this here is the,

The byproduct of a peak flood discharge of about 40 million cubic feet per second, which is about one-tenth the magnitude, roughly, of the big flows in the channel scab lands. But...

It's still mind-blowingly powerful when you see the effects and know what you're looking at. You see the boulder deposits and the gigantic gravel bars, and you realize, okay, so this is what 40 million cubic feet per second can do. What's 400 million cubic feet per second going to do? So we got some photos of that too. So, yeah, we're going to be covering that territory. Snake River goes across the plain of southern Idaho. So, yeah, five, six days with us coming up and –

mid-May here. So a couple seats left. Definitely check the description if you think you can jump in last minute with us. Well, let's just look here. We're going to start. We'll start here out of Salt Lake City. Is that the deal? That's right. Yes. Yeah. So we'll gather in Salt Lake City and then we will head north. And what we should mention is that this is the Great Salt Lake, but the Great Salt Lake Basin

The terminal Ice Age Lake filled all of these valleys here. And all of this flat, again, is the sediment, the alluvium that was laid down in the lake bottom. And then what we're going to do is there was a breakout point right up here. And this is Highway 15 right now follows this.

the breakout of the floodwaters. And let's see, Red Rock Pass would be... Yeah, right under that 91 there. Yeah, right under the... Yeah, right in here. There it is right there. Swan Lake, yeah. There it is. There's the breakout point. Yeah, Red Rock Junction.

So there was, this was infilled with a softer sedimentary rock through here. And this was like the northernmost tip of the lake was right here. And then it backed up all the way down through this arm, all the way back down into here and filled this basin. And right here where we start out in Salt Lake City, the water was just right up almost a thousand feet deep.

And then it came up here, and when this soft rock dam failed right in here, the water began to gush out. And you can see this eroded terrain because this was the main passage for the discharge of the water right here. And when we go through, let's see. Well, that would, I'm guessing this is probably red rock right here.

Yeah, that's the little Red Rock Butte there. Yeah, Red Rock Butte. And so Red Rock Butte is about 300 feet high, and it marks a remnant of the pre-flood sedimentary rock dam. So this piece right here would have been continuous with this whole layer from here across over to here.

And so this breach allowed about 40 million cubic feet per second to discharge through. And the water level of the lake dropped about 350 feet. The water level essentially...

dropped just about the same amount as the, uh, as the Butte is high. And then when it gets to the bottom of the Butte, now there's sediment laying on top of it, but right under all this is, is a hard granite sill. So the water level dropped until it hit that sill and then it's stabilized. And when we go out of, uh, Salt Lake, we'll be able to see the two shorelines that were etched into the sides of the mountains. Uh,

right there brigham city we're gonna make a stop okay yeah right here because that uh yeah we're probably not going to be able to no time to divert around bear lake unfortunately now because we're going a long way day one to be able to see the uh to get up to the teton dam site yeah it's really a dog bag i'll tell you what um we we have or you have covered this do you know i've

recently posted an archive that we did. We tried, uh, 2017. So there was an hour of you going through this whole path. And then you did one of your big picture episodes that you focused on the bottom. Do you know the title of that one? We need to pop that in the description too. People can get the details, but, um,

Yeah, I think that was the second one we did. Like the greatest story never told is part two or something? I think that's part three. Okay. I can easily find out and we can post it in the show notes or something.

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Yeah. Well, let me, let me, uh, let me show you something that I would did playing around yesterday. Okay. So I'm going to follow, we can follow that same path. So yeah, if you stop a share and let me see if I can share this thing, uh, screen two. No, there's no audio. All right. You see in this low angle. Yep. So we are going into Red Rock pass right there. So we're just barely over the Idaho border from Utah going North.

Like we said, Route 91. So let's see if we can get this. And we're looking north here. Yep, going north. So we're following Route 91 north through Red Rock Pass. So right where the road is straight right here. That's our little Red Rock Butte there. Where is it? Back up for us there. Yep, right along here. Oh, okay. Okay.

Oh, okay, yeah. So we're looking deep into the distance, right? We've got the horizon out there. So we're going to ride on down and follow this valley that was the breakout. And you can see a bit of a channel. Yeah, an inner channel. So see right here, that's where we join up with the interstate. So this is I-15 coming north here. And then it's going to do this dogleg, right? Yeah. Income is the little town. And then it goes through, follows the Port Neuf River. Let's see.

That dog leg is interesting there. Pause right there for a second. And then you got that little tributary coming in from over on the right, coming in from the northeast. Yeah, so that's why I was going to say it. It seems like it's the first wave must have. It totally looks like it had to push through here. The momentum of that water is coming straight in that direction. So a lot of it made the turn, but it looks like it had to flow through here also.

Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking as I was seeing that. This is very helpful. And I stopped there and flew the drone there too, so I got some good shots of it. And then down there, you look just to the left, you really almost see that scab land-like erosion with that escarpment there. Right here. Yeah, right there, and then down below that, come down. Yeah, this is like a basalt cliff right next to the highway, so that's really impressive right there. You drive right by it.

Yeah, I can do this manually, I guess, versus playing and pausing. Okay. Then we come in and it breaks through the hills right there. Right, so you got this little breakout point, right? Port Neuf Pass, it's the Port Neuf River. And then look at this. Yeah. You got a big sand quarry over there. So that's, you know, looks like a pretty sizable delta right there, right outside the breakthrough point. No kidding.

That'd be interesting to go into the visit the sand quarry, but probably there's definitely. All right. And then the pathway is pretty obvious through there. Yeah. So we're getting out into Pocatello.

By the way, when the floodwaters were gushing out through that aperture in the hills there, the town of Pocatello was not there. So in case anybody was wondering. Okay, so you got the Snake River coming out of Yellowstone and then over in Wyoming, right? So it's in Idaho. So this is American Falls Reservoir that Interstate 86 travels along. So we're going to take that route.

There's the dam there. Then you've got a bit of a channel starting up in this broad valley. Then way back here, this is your lava field. That's craters of the moon. Craters of the moon. Now, mentioned at this green area, at the peak of the flood, you can actually see this transition from the green area

agricultural land into the brown that was the the the width that was the shoreline that would have been the maximum northern shoreline of the of the flood as it's passing through here it was not confined to the channel but like all floods we've talked about this so much oftentimes they will start out as a sheet flow but undoubtedly there would have been some kind of a pre-flood snake river

valley or channel there that would have been exploited by the water. But initially, whatever was there was not capable of handling the full capacity. So the water spread out over the whole plane that you can see right here.

So it would have been completely submerged down where your, where your cursor is now. And it would have been completely submerged all the way up to where that transition took place, takes place up there from, from green checkered agricultural fields. Yeah. Behind us, there's a range of mountains. So that would have held it on the South side, but yeah, like you said, it expanded a good ways. I don't know. That's, you know, tens, tens of miles possibly out here, 20, 20 some miles. Yeah.

Yeah, this is about the end of this. So we just follow the river down to what was called Massacre Rocks. When we were there, they don't identify it as that anymore. Right here along the river. So that's going to be one of our stops right there. And then with the terrain, you can see it better. But you've got this outlet where, you know, obviously the water was at least 100 feet higher to cut this and spread out that way.

So that is a distributary rather than a tributary. There you go. Because it goes off the main trunk. But you can see, like right up there, there's a cataract at the top end of it. Right there, yeah. Up in here, yes. So you had water flowing down.

Out of the Snake River Canyon. And then you had water flowing surface flow that cut this here, this feature that you were just hovering over. Right. Yep. Okay. So that's one section of the outbreak. So that's something I was just playing around with, how to fly through these and use a screen recorder, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great tool. I got to confess. So I've got one, but it's really slow. I did one from here, then all the way over to Clearwater at Lewiston and Clarkston. I followed the snake all the way over there. Uh-huh, okay. Yeah, we won't do that. But yeah, just playing. I get lost in Google Earth. Yeah, we're going to do this occasionally, have different people on. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Mike, you didn't get up here with me. You're about ready for a road trip, aren't you? I'd love a road trip, but I'm not sure I can do it anytime soon. All right. All right. I'm scanning over here. Massacre rocks. So is this a new visitor center? What is this?

They were working on the parking lots. I don't remember that they were working on the visitor center, but yeah, it's probably something different than 25 years ago. Yeah. They were, they were cleaning up the campground and yeah, it's a pretty extensive park. It is. It is. So this is a big, so this is like a huge deposit of stuff that you'll, you know, you'll see when we get there. It's a pretty impressive Boulder field. Look, they're still calling it massacre rocks here.

Okay, yeah, on the other side, huh? But not the park. Let's see. Okay, so there are some boulders to differentiate from the foliage. When you pull out, sometimes it's hard to tell. Well, there's a big truck on the highway there. Uh-huh. Yep, yep, okay. Well, that says Massacre Rocks, too. So, yeah, I haven't seen it. My map hasn't been coming up that way. Huh.

Well, you know what? I'm looking at Google Maps. And then on Google Earth, I don't have any of the labels on. It's just the images. So we'll be following this route right here. We've got your schedule. We're going to do a stop right here so that people can run laps if they want. And then it kind of flattens out, doesn't it, before it gets spectacular again. Right, before you get to Twin Falls. It gets pretty dramatic again.

But what is all this? Could this all be alluvium? Just piles of alluvium? See, you know, when you're traveling, there's so much stuff off the road that you don't see. But yeah, and then it gets interesting again when we get, let's see, so we would have a dam right there. What dam is this? Not sure about that one. Okay. And then below the dam, it starts getting rather spectacular again. Hey, look at this. A streamlined erosional residual. Right there. There it is. Look, another one. More. More.

Okay. Well, it's going to be a hell of a trip. I can tell you that. And this is just part of it that we've looked at here. That's Lake Walcott. I don't know if that's the name of the dam, but there is a park down there at the western end. Yeah, Lake Walcott. Oh, down here? No. Up here. The one you asked about. Yes. Okay. So what is Lake Walcott known for? Wow. Look at this. Randall talking about it on episode 112. Okay.

And yeah, okay, and then we end up, this ends up going up here to Hell's Canyon. And that's about how far we're going to take it, right? No, we're going to stay at Boise, the southeast end of Boise, where the airport is. And down, that's getting closer to the Bruno Canyon and also the Swan Falls Dam is just south of there. So yeah, we're not going to get any farther west.

Well, I will enjoy getting back to Boise. I like Boise when we were there before. So this is the interesting area right here. So Snake River goes right up along this canyon, forms the rim, the eastern rim of this feature right here.

And that is ultimately the area where all of the basalt flows originated that created the Columbia Basalt Plateau, which is all of this. So, and let's see. It looks like the other, isn't it the other end of the, like the Yellowstone? Well, yeah, Yellowstone. This is Yellowstone Lake right here. And this is the curve that...

This is the curve. You can't, you don't. Yeah. Okay. You can follow that curve like this, right around like this. Yeah. Okay. And then all the way up and that's the snake river flows out and meets the Columbia right there at Lewiston and Clarkston where Tammany bar is that we've visited several times. And we, uh,

Brad made special arrangements to get us in, and we were given a tour of the big gravel quarry there, which was very, very interesting to me. That was so worth it. Yeah, that was excellent. Yeah, it was excellent. It really was. And that was only day one. And that was only day one. Set the bar high on that tour. Yeah, yeah. So what else is news is we had a really great sacred geometry retreat.

up at Bershaba Springs Assembly. And we had 54 seats. We were sold out. It was really, we had a Friday night lecture, a Saturday all day learning to draw hands on. And then Sunday, we had a couple of, Sunday, right? We took the field trip. Right. We went to visit All Saints Chapel in Sewanee, well, that hosts the University of the South.

which is considered to have one of the most beautiful campuses of any college in, in the United States. And having visited it now three times, I can concur. I can see why it would be. I'll vouch for that too. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we, we went and we, we toured the chapel. I'll mention that the chapel, uh, long story there. We won't get into that in, in this episode, talking about the backstory on that. Um,

But it was a long process. It started pre-Civil War and then actually finished up 1950s, was it? I think it was 1950s. But it was inspired, the primary architect on the project was inspired by Chartres Cathedral and Amiens.

And he carried some of that in, some of the proportioning and the rose windows and things. Very beautiful, impressive piece of work. Then we left there. We went to the campus of the University of the South, and we met Carolyn Holdland, who is the farm manager, because they have a whole regenerative farm program there, an agricultural program that they do there.

And so she was gracious enough to take us on a tour, explain to us their workings in the greenhouse. And, you know, it's all pretty much run by the students at the college. And that was very interesting. Then we got to go and hang out with the goats.

And that was really, that was probably the highlight of the whole weekend was hanging with the goats. Goat hugging. Yeah, everybody enjoyed that. Goat hugging, yes. And there were a bunch of us learned that even the females can have horns. That was a big question going around when we showed up. Yeah, well. Not a farm person, all right. Yeah, well, yes, the females can have horns. We learned that. Yep.

But they were friendly. They liked hanging out with humans and liked the attention. And that was a lot of fun. So it was a really good weekend, and we are going to do a level two next fall. We're planning it so it doesn't conflict. Is that available? Can people still –

purchase that and and watch the live stream and do the exercises from that absolutely yeah yes available too yeah we go to howtube.com we've got it we we live streamed it recorded the whole thing and so uh if people have purchased that which you know you can do it at home purchase it watch it at home do it with the whole family because we kind of oriented it with the idea that

Something that there's enough information in or basic information that will be valuable for, you know, students who need to learn geometry, you know, who are doing a curriculum. So kind of the idea in mind was make this valuable or functional to homeschoolers. And so that's,

Anyways, yeah, now we've got two versions of the level one. We've got the one we did a couple of years ago in Nashville. We got this one. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also some distinctions between them that are, I think, valuable. And so somebody can actually buy the two bundled together.

And it's a really good deal. Oh, that's good. Well, yeah, any lecture you give, there's always a wide variety of things that you pull in. There's obviously definite points that you want to hit each time to get across the point to the class. But, yeah, everyone's unique. So there's, what, three different lectures there? You went past 11 o'clock one of the nights still drawing. I guess we did. Yeah, it was a full weekend. Yeah.

Yeah, so that would be... I interrupted there. You said you're going to do a level two. Are you going to try to get another level one class in? Do something in Atlanta or Asheville or something? Well, I'm open, but I don't think we're going to need to. I mean, with the number of sales of the... I think we've got enough people out there. And I'm putting together some bonus material that's going to go out to anybody who...

was in-house seats or who bought the live stream or the aftermarket live stream, you know, which is recorded, which you can buy, and then you'll get a downloadable file and you can get the whole weekend. So anybody who does that, yeah, I mean, because it's going to pick up. The online one can still qualify to participate in level two without being there in person. Well, yeah, you've got a viable audience to participate.

fill that course too that yeah it's going to be at the bershba it ought to be really nice time of year to be there you know in the early fall and uh we're already planning a field trip to a nearby observatory so i'm looking in to see what's going on astronomically while we're there uh see if there's going to be anything special but um yeah rowan's setting that up uh it's going to be yeah we do actually i mean we've reserved rowan's not here but uh it's in september announced but

teasing that it's this fall? It'll be in September. Yeah, okay. We've reserved a block of rooms there and the big meeting hall like we did before. And I forget which weekend it is. But yeah, we'll be announcing that soon. All the specifics on it to everybody that has participated. Now, if you...

Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say you find out about these things by getting Randall's monthly newsletter. Yeah. That's the best way to learn as soon as possible, more than the crowd that would see it on YouTube. You can actually get the monthly newsletter where all these events upcoming are typically announced first. So that's easy to do, randallcarlson.com slash newsletter, and it just takes an email address.

So, yeah, that's something we might want to just briefly let you cover here before we get into a break. Just the one for April came out a couple days ago. So definitely some interesting stuff.

stories in there you cover recent scientific articles and give your your summation of them and one of them was very applicable to the studies out there again for the cordillera and ice age floods so yeah i haven't been able to read through that yet i just i just saw it this morning so uh is that something you can kind of overview for us

Well, since you asked... That's probably something we could do a whole podcast on that and related stuff that's come out in the last year and we haven't been doing Cosmos. Well, let's see here. Since you asked so politely, we could do that. And...

Let's see. I wonder if I should pull up the newsletter that went out. I send the raw thing over to Laura. She forwards it to Casey, and Casey puts it together in newsletter format. And she's the one who sends it out, and she does a really good job.

I've got to, let's see. Thank you, Laura and Casey. It went out late this month, of course, because of everything that has been going on. We were busy, but we got it out. Let's see. So Mike and Dave's Multiverse Worldviews Media. Well, why are you looking for that? Yeah, well, I don't know. I think you told me it sold out. You're going to be out in Sedona with Graham Hancock, but that might not be.

available for tickets anymore but that is that's probably a live stream also i believe it is and i think he's arranged an overflow room if people okay yeah because it did sell on though yeah hey good for them yeah that's great so yeah i'll be hanging out with graham again and seeing him in a couple of years so that'll be great yeah i think it's going to be a lot of fun i'm looking forward to it i just you know wish that i had had more time i could have we could have done a tour out there

Because, oh, my God, the sights out there are unbelievable. No question. Yeah, great time of year to be out exploring the desert. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need.

With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. This is the newsletter, so here we go. Let's see. Ah, look at this. What do we got here? Well...

Oh, my. Yeah, good, good. Well, we did find that Shoshone Falls Park is closed until the week after we're there. So what are you saying? We're going to have to break in? We're going to have to find our own way in. I'm not saying what you said. Okay. We're going to have to find another access point because the road will be closed.

So next month from May 11th through the 17th, Brad Young, that's you, Brad, myself, and the Grimerica boys will be following the route of the mighty Bonneville flood from its origins in Utah with the break out of gigantic Lake Bonneville through Red Rock Pass north through and across the Snake River Plain of Idaho. Yeah.

Yeah, along the way, we will visit and explore some truly amazing sites while becoming literate in the language of catastrophe. This tour is part of an ongoing project to facilitate the unveiling of the epic manuscript engraved into the planetary landscape that has been waiting more than 12,000 years to reveal itself to those with the eyes to see. Now, this was 10 spots, but now it's down to five spots. So, wow. Okay.

Then I wrote something about the subterranean structures below the Giza pyramids. And as I say here, I was not intending...

to remark on the supposed structures detected below Khafre's pyramid, but since I have been asked repeatedly for my thoughts on the matter, I have agreed to venture forth from my ivory tower to declare my opinion before the eagerly anticipating masses.

Okay. Well, after all that bombast, all I can really say is that I am ambivalent about the whole thing. That was kind of bombastic. I wasn't going to say anything. You didn't think I was taking myself seriously. Well, okay. Randall's feeling good. Where's that ivory tower? I haven't checked that out, man. You know, like I, like I,

often say, you know, sometimes I even impress myself. And the thing of it is, I'm not easily impressed. I will vouch for that also. Take all that for what it's worth.

First of all, the scenario is so extreme in its implications that if it were real, it would overturn our entire historical narrative, calling into question everything we have assumed about our past. But with a tip of the hat to Carl Sagan, I must agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. What is needed is peer review of the scientific reports followed by independent replication and

uh, what form independent replication could or should take remains to be seen. But then when I get into it, I'm not going to go through it all, but what, this is one of the things, you know, if you get the newsletter, I go into a whole background about, uh, you know, former, the times when, uh, Egypt was, was wet and had a lot of, uh,

rainfall and water erosion. There's a lot of water erosion. If you could sweep away all of the desert sand and look at the bedrock beneath, it's all scarred with water erosion. And then this to me was one of the most interesting of the things that, you know, when you realize this, and it may have bearing on what those images, which I can't interpret, they look like something, the images that

that were published. What it is, my first conjecture would be taking the lowest common denominator, Occam's razor would be that they're natural, that there's some kind of natural cavities because I'd actually often thought that was an, uh, an option for Egypt. When I learned about, um, you know, those first shuttle overflights in, uh,

in the 1980s that were able to look through the sand and see the eroded bedrock beneath. But this is interesting, and then I'll jump back out of this, but we'll just go through this part right here. This is in discussing the importance of the Nile River in the life of Egypt and

But despite having a small discharge, the river itself, geologist Rushdie Saeed explains the remarkable fact, and I'm quoting here, the Nile is not only small relative to other rivers of the world, but it is also small compared to its predecessors. Since the incision of the Valley of the Nile as a grand canyon, some two and a half kilometers deep,

This occurred about 6 million years ago. Gigantic rivers have come and gone filling this canyon, unquote. And then I point out here the 2.5 kilometers is equal to 8,200 feet or about a mile and a half. It took an extraordinary amount of water to carve a canyon to this depth, and this canyon sits right at the edge of the Giza Plateau. So, you know, if that's the case, then...

You've got this mile and a half deep canyon right there. This huge aperture opening this space in the earth. Is it out of the question that you might have natural cavities of a large scale? So the rest of it goes through here, looking at just a small sample of the evidence for these water flows in ancient Egypt and the alternating the deserts and then the lush green land.

that, that interspersed and these climate changes that are preserved, which are pretty amazing in themselves. If you get the newsletter, you can read all that. And then, uh, about all that, then I get into, uh, the, uh, it's called, uh, the terminal, uh, uh, the terminal ice age mega floods in British Columbia, uh,

an alternative hypothesis. Now this is interesting here because this is from a paper about studies primarily in the Prince George area and the Fraser River, which in 1999, you and I did a traverse from the headwaters of the Fraser all the way down to Vancouver and everywhere along there, we were observing mega flood features. And now

There's this paper and another paper. I'm going to pull this up here in a minute. It's called, it was published in 2021 by John J. Clagg.

Brian Menounos, who I am, I've read papers by him before. The other authors I don't know. But the title of the paper is, and it appeared in the journal Geomorphology, the title of the paper is A Huge Flood in the Fraser River Valley, British Columbia, near the Pleistocene Termination. So this was, I think, part of this whole complex of, again, why I think it needs to be called the Cordilleran Floods.

And I think that interestingly, the dates that are coming up on this thing are looking like right around eight, 11, five or 11, six. Meltwater pulse one B now that's I'm wondering, is that accurate? Um, but right there, I mean, I instantly noticed that that correlation. So, um, in the newsletter, I go into it. I've got some great graphics here of, of glacial Lake Frazier, um,

I probably should share that because I think you'd like to see this. Yeah, I think you had some images there as I was scrolling down through the newsletter. Yeah, definitely. We can take a look at that. And we're really wanting to do a tour up in B.C. also. You know, we were there in 99, like you said. That's where...

the grammarica guys are darren and graham that do the grammarica podcast and they are they're the contact at the cabin host that take care and organize the uh the tours that we're doing out there for the mega floods so yeah that's another one that's in the works i think here for looking at the images i'm going to go right to the originals uh rather than looking at the online version uh

Just take a second here. There's April. And here we go. Well, we'll probably take a break here coming soon too. Yeah. And then we'll talk about the Teton Dam. Okay. I can enlarge this. Yeah. So this is probably worthy of a whole show or at least half one. Oh, yeah. Maybe we can check in with Jerome. He might be having some influence on some of these guys out there.

Well, yes, I think he very much could be. We hope so. And Nick Zentner too. He's made a bunch of good videos people are paying attention to. All right. Well, we got to kind of get Nick to start thinking bigger.

Bigger, yep, yep. Well, last I heard, and I don't follow him, but yeah, just I got that he was kind of done with the mega floods. He was going to start talking more regularly about volcanoes. No. Okay, well. But not that he never wants to hear about it or talk about it again, but yeah, I think the stretch of videos have turned into a different topic. Aha, well.

Well, we certainly know then that if he's moved on, there's plenty of unexplored, unexplained, uninvestigated material sitting right there that needs to be looked at. All right, so here, hopefully you're seeing this. This is Glacial Lake Fraser. You can see there's Prince George. So Prince George would have been like 300 feet underwater. And you see here there's an arm of it that extends down into the Rocky Mountain Trench.

But the main body of it follows the Snake River down, and then you see Williams Lake. So this is the pathway we followed coming out of Prince George. We didn't get up that far in 99. Well, we got to Prince George. We went in 2015. Where did we pick up Fraser Valley at in 99? Revelstoke, maybe? No, we followed the Columbia. I'm not sure where we picked up the Fraser.

Right, we went to the headwaters of the Columbia. We did do that, yeah. Well, let's see. So what year did we go to Prince George when we had, speaking, we had George with us on? 2015 with Ed and George and, yeah, a couple guys. Uh-huh, yeah. So that would have been, yeah, yeah, right. There was like seven of us, I think. So, yeah, so this was, there's a whole tour we're going to put together in here that will encompass going to Banff

Jasper, we'll look at the erratics train. I mean, there's so much here. The challenge is going to be how to narrow it down to a week, week and a half. Well, yeah, that's the thing. We're going to have to do a week and a half. It's not going to be a six-day, five-day, five-and-a-half-day one. Well, we go to all the trouble to get up there. Might as well.

So then this is the N'Chako River, which is one of the tributaries to the Fraser. And this was the N'Chako River. If I go back here, the Chaco comes in right here. It comes in this way. The N'Chako Plateau. Yeah, the N'Chako Plateau, exactly. And so this whole valley was a conduit for giant meltwater floods. So you've got a big terrace built here, right? This is, you know...

The Great Terrace. Not the same one, obviously, but yeah, this is, again, one of the features that you regularly see throughout these mega flood pathways is these big terraces. And then that's just a graphic that I included in the newsletter to help people understand what they were reading about. We got this, what they're calling whalebacks. There are whalebacks on some of these terrace surfaces. There's also giant current ripples.

Kettle lakes, so kettle lakes, this is anywhere where a glacier, I mean, sorry, an iceberg came to ground within the alluvium and then melted away. So it's called a kettle because it reminded presumably, I don't know, the settlers or whom, explorers or whomever of literal kettles, right? Because generally it's got one little breakthrough of the mound that's like a spout, right?

Where it drains. Yeah, right. Often it does that. It has a spout, yes. Yeah. So what's the difference between a humpback or a whaleback and a drumlin? Because I remember seeing those with Jerome when we were out there in 2017. Yeah. I don't know unless it has to do with the, you know, because drumlins are very distinctly blunt at the up current end and tapered at the downstream end. Maybe it has to do with that because I think these were described as being by-

Bi-convex, which means that they've got a double, that they're convex along the long axis, and then they're also convex perpendicular to the long axis. So they're called bi-convex. So I think it's probably just the shape. Now, it might be... The taper of the ends.

Yeah, the taper of the end. So it might be that the whalebacks are formed under a free flow with a free surface. Okay. But I'm not 100% sure on that, but I'm definitely going to be looking into this so I can really fully understand every nuance of this evidence here. A sub-formation of the streamlined erosional residual. Yes. Yes.

And then, and see, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, this is the kind of stuff you're missing out on. Then I go into the remnants of ancient technology in the American Southwest. And this is interesting stuff. I'll just scroll down here. So it's the, some of this, what we already know is that there were these ancient roadways.

uh, in the Southwest, just like there are up in the Northeast along the mound structures are these perfectly straight roadways. Well, so this is a, uh, a new study that just came out. Uh, let's see. Yeah. Uh, well, no, this is an older one that I refer back to, to help con, uh, give context to the new work. See, so this was a 1978 paper, uh,

It was titled stone circles of, of Chaco Canyon, Northwestern New Mexico. Let me see. Do I have the whole, I definitely have the whole reference in here. Um,

But it was in the journal Antiquity, carried a report about new LIDAR and field studies undertaken on a little-known archaeological site that is part of the ancient Chacoan complex in New Mexico. This site, known as the Gasco site, was investigated by Robert S. Weiner, I don't know which, with the Department of Religion.

Dartmouth College, Richard A. Friedman with the Geographic Information Systems, and John R. Stein in Independent Reacher, who's done some really interesting papers on the Chacoan stuff that I've been reading. So this is their study. We'll just...

I'll just the underlying part here where they're saying many researchers concur that a compelling religious tradition with associated ritual practices and architectural forms underlay this regional influence and the authority of Chaco and leaders. But so what they've done is they've discovered using LIDAR that there's this long set of parallel roads. And if I scroll down here, we can see that. I'll come back to that. Um,

Should be, yeah, right here. Okay, so here's the LiDAR image. And you can see here's the north, what they call the north road. And then you have the south road, right? Now, it turns out that this is, if you go look at this alignment, it's northwest to southeast. And the alignment happens to be exactly the alignment of the midwinter sunrise from this latitude.

So we can see here, here's their showing where they've mapped out the edges of the, this would be the, yeah, the South Parallel Road. So the lines here define the outer edges of the road.

And then you see in the distance Mount Taylor, which is considered to be a sacred pilgrimage mountain to the Puebloan people. And it's indicated clearly that they considered it significant enough to align this long road to that mountain and where it meets the horizon. And the modern Pueblo people still hold Mount Taylor in sanctity. But so then here, the authors of this paper, which is open source—

They went down here on winter solstice morning. And here's the sun rising directly over Mount Taylor. Mount Taylor. So you've got this huge construction, what would have been back in the day. And I started with stone circles because one of the interesting features of this is that there are these mysterious stone circles that you find. And that was what I was showing. Like they're right here. The Herodura. Herodura.

That's the, uh, is that Spanish? Uh, this is what they call the things, these circles. So there's one of them right here. And so this, that's why I went back to help people understand these stone circles. And then the stone circles had, uh, these circular pits, some of the basins, stone basins, uh, in the number and, and,

it's surmised the possibility that these stone basins might actually form star maps, but they didn't get that far into their study. And this was a study here, these old pictures from the, from the 1978 paper, uh, where they were first looking at these stone circles, not really connecting the stone circles as part of a complex that included these long parallel roads. So yeah. So I'm on the bluff up above the Canyon.

Where are these? Yeah, well, that one we just looked at is right here. It's right here. I think this is the one we were just looking at. But there's bunches of them. Yeah, they're on the rim of Chaco Canyon. And then, yeah. And then, but the most interesting thing to me right here, where it really gets interesting, is if you follow this alignment, the road,

which defines the midwinter sunrise, it's also defined geologically. Because at the beginning of the road and the end of the road are two sacred springs. Now, that to me is interesting. Is that just a coincidence that if you draw this line between these two sacred springs, it gives you the midwinter sunrise alignment? The winter solstice sunrise alignment?

That's interesting to me. Not necessarily that there's a road between the springs, but that the springs are lined up with that alignment. Well, the springs, I'm assuming, were there before the roads were built. Yeah, yeah. Which came first, the alignment? I mean, did they define the springs and then lay out the road? Because it ends at this spring down here. And I think that that'd make an interesting trip, wouldn't it?

So regarding this coincidence, the author's comment, the Gasco roads also events associations with water, a scarce resource crucial to the sustenance of life and the focus of much Pueblo and Dine ceremonialism. Most prominently, the Gasco roads connect the Gasco Hereduros with watery places, a spring in the cliffs behind Blue Jay and the head of Tufalt Canyon.

The deposition of water-worn pebbles at both Heroduras— Heroduras, that's a misspelling there, I should fix—

there we go and a blue green turquoise chip at the little gasco herradura likely expressed relationships with water the alignment towards mount taylor is also relevant as mountains are strongly connected with water among the pueblo and dna people numerous previously documented chaco and roads terminate at watery places so again this is uh

Yeah, this association between architectural and infrastructure expressions endowed with special sanctity, the alignment with cosmic events and the presence of natural springs, all apparently a part of an integrated system, is of considerable significance, and it should be mentioned that the example discussed herein is by no means an isolated one, but has counterparts in many examples in a vast system of sacred geography found throughout

Far removed from Chaco Canyon, but I should mention is part of the hub, which is occupied by Chaco Canyon. It's part of that whole system that now I was in some of the older work I was writing about. This was putting 10,000 square miles. It's much bigger than even that now.

So here was the paper, the Parallel Road Solstice and Sacred Geography at the Gasco site, a Chaco and ritual landscape just came out 2025. So every month I report on interesting breaking news in the realm of

subject matter that would be of interest to cosmographians um there it is yeah yeah so there there it is that's the whole that's that's the raw form it gets sent over to the ladies then they jazz it up and send it out but then what i'm doing it's not a little couple sentences you're you're really summarized not even summarizing you're covering the full yeah of these papers yes

And like you said, bringing in other previous papers. If people want to dig in themselves, you give them a pathway to follow even more info. So, yeah, sign up. Get that every month from Randall. Indeed. Indeed. Break time. Yeah, let's do a little break here, and we'll come back. I want to show a couple photos, and that will lead us right into the Teton Dam. Yeah. All right. Sounds good. All right. Taking a break. Right back. Bye-bye.

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Wait, do your Lewis and Clark here. Do your Lewis and Clark here. What, do you want me to do my Lewis first? That way? Yeah. Okay. There's my Lewis. Here's Clark. All right, guys, we're back here on Cosmographia. Episode 112, how about that? We're pulling it together. You got normal guy, Mike? You got any wild stories for us or everything normal?

Nothing wild. Everything's normal. No? Okay. Well, yeah, we've been talking about the Teton Dam failure, and we're definitely going to get out there on our tour. And so Randall's written quite a bit, and I've been out there. So I'm going to share a couple photos here.

uh stills i took from my drone flyover video and then uh randall got some more of the historical photos because the event was back in 1976 yep bicentennial year that's right all right let's see i got these queued up here i think all right so this is one of our stops this is actually a closer in shot of what's my background right now yeah this is the big boulder bar

On the Snake River below the Swan Falls Dam out in the distance there. Are you guys seeing this? Mm-hmm. There we go. Yeah. Oh, my. Look at that. All right. So, yeah, Snake River coming through here. It's actually flowing south to north, and that's the Swan Falls Dam out in the distance there. Mm-hmm. Right? So, here's my SUV. So, this is on the north side of the river? Well, right there, it's the east side.

Because the river's going south to north. Right. Okay. The south of Boise. Yeah. So that gives you some good scale. I mean, that little black thing there is your SUV, right? Right. So that's my car down there. So you see most of these are bigger than my car. Yeah. Easily. They're bigger. They're more like garage-sized. And then some.

Right, so I haven't gotten to this yet, but I just flew my drone over Marshall and the French Broad River, and it's very obvious...

the stones were moved and the water flow is not straight down now it takes a turn and it's because these rocks got pushed off from the wall that's the barrier at the the nose of the island the floodwaters eroded all that and pushed those rocks out into the the middle of the riverbed so the

the flow is quite different and that flood was 27 feet deep, right? So the rocks are not that big, but it did move them. So it's kind of a scale and variant thing. So that's something I'm going to play with and put together and compare it to what was moved here. Well, you can get some indication of how deep the water is by looking at this washed up stuff against the flanks of the cliffs. Right. On the other side. Yeah. Even more so. Yeah. It's way up there.

Uh, let's see. I got one more look in the other direction. Oh, wow. So that's down, down the snake heading North and then it, then it veers off Northwest. So again, my little car down there, so it's not, not a tiny car, but yeah, most of these are, are that big. And then some, so yeah, we're going to, we're going to go roam around down here. And, uh, yeah, I think some, uh, some of Randall and there's one of them for sure that, you know, one of my favorite pictures we've ever taken is us atop a couple of these rocks down here. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So that is Snake River, Swan Falls, Boulder Bar. All right. So here's the overflight of the Teton Dam site. I think one backs off. There we go. Oh, wow. Right? So the lake was never filled up, right? It started draining before it even filled. So this spillway was probably never even used at all. Yeah, I think that, well, yeah, it was just about to top out, I think, when it failed. Was it? Okay. Yeah. So let's see. I got a couple of these here.

So right, didn't you say it's like lust? They thought they'd use lust as a damming material? Doesn't sound like a good idea. No, it does not sound like a good idea to me. Look at that. So there's still a big mountain in the middle, and then there's trails, and people take their bicycles and motorbikes, and you can hike up to the top of it. There's people fishing down there. There's all kinds of area down here. So it's very accessible. So we'll roam around there a good bit.

And then that's right, you've got the spillway here, so this is down the Teton River out into the plain there. Yeah. So you'll have some older but very similar versions of this shot. Try to remember what the peak discharge was. Maybe I have that in... We might run across it in your literature there. I don't recall that one right off. But yeah, it's like the whole... If there were some...

concrete, anything injected into the bedrock here, they removed it or it washed out. There's nothing of a structure on either side. Well, this right here. You can see all the trails around on both sides. Yeah, you see that switchback trail going to the top. That is the remnant of the dam right there. Yeah, yeah. That's all that's left of it. All right. We got a couple more.

Mallet Gorge here. I'll flip through those, I guess, since we're here. Yeah, yeah. You go right into the... Well, this is one of our stops. Pulled a couple out. We're seeing beautiful examples of recessional cataracts. Right here, and then this one, yeah, goes right under the interstate. So you can see the semi-trucks out there. I think I got one closer in up on the waterfall. So this was an overland sheet flow that came in and it channelized. That's exactly what this was.

It found some weakness in the bedrock, exploited it, and then it started enlarging it. And at some point, this gorge most likely captured all of the overflow from the land. And once that happens, of course, then that accelerates the downcutting and the erosion. And you can see all the rubble there on the floor. And you can see that the modern water flow was not responsible for cutting this gorge.

But you can also look over here on this limb over here, on this side over here, where you can see there's probably going to be a collapse going on right there. You see the ground opening up? Yeah. Yeah, so I was going to say there's much bigger examples of that. I think you called it mass wasting. Yep, mass wasting. But yeah, you take the little bridge and then there's an overlook or you can go right along the rim if you want to. And then, yeah, there's plenty of trails to explore around here. Yeah, that's where I want it.

Yep. So see all the trails and then it's, it's farther down here where there's really big chunks of the, the wall that's starting to slough off in down into the Canyon. And this, and we should mention this Creek here, uh, a river, I believe it's enough flow to be a river, small river is tributary to the snake.

The Mallard River. Yeah, correct. Yeah, the Mallard River. Just behind us, right off the bottom of the screen, right? It opens up. I don't have that angle in these pictures that I just grabbed real quick earlier. All right, so then we're back into Red Rock Pass here. There it is, yeah. Looking north there, right? So, yeah, kind of a monster terrace. Yeah, look at that. You see the embankment over there. So this was the spillway for 350 feet or so of water.

Down cutting. Yeah, there's Red Rock, right? That's Red Rock right up there. No, that's it over there. Over here. Oh, there's another one. You're looking south, so you're looking into the Lake Bonneville. Yeah. Like this way, right? So it was, you can kind of follow maybe a high water level across here. But yeah, massive, massive. I've got other Google Earth images, yeah, that kind of show off into the distance. Just all the different...

dry lake beds that used to be part of and it was 20 20,000 square miles is that right estimated probably bigger than that but that's kind of the round term it's used all right same looking looking north yeah that's a remnant that's all that's left of that sedimentary 350 feet of sedimentary rock

that formed the dam behind which the high waters of Lake Monteville, as it rose up, it eventually rose up to this level, which is basically right at the top of the outcrop. And then I'm guessing that the most likely scenario is that it overtopped. Once it overtopped, it rapidly eroded down through that 350 feet of rock and

And then below the roads here down, and I'm not sure what the depth is, but underneath it's a much harder rock. And so at that point, the lake level stabilized. So I'm thinking if you look at that terrace just above it, the flat terrace right in there, that...

was probably close to the high water mark. Generally, the water is a little higher than the terraces that it produces. And that probably then would coincide with the Bonneville shoreline that we'll see on the mountains. And then it dropped down to the shoreline. Well, we'll be able to see two shorelines. Oh, I forget the name of them that we're trying to come up with.

Right. The names of the shorelines? Yeah. I don't know those. Well, Bonneville is the upper one, and it'll come to me in a second. Yeah, I don't have any lined up photos of that, but yeah, they're very prominent for miles and miles. Can't miss them. So they're right parallel to the Interstate 15. All right, so that's the end of that photo. Little run there.

It was either the... No, I think it was the Provo shoreline. Provo sounds more... Yeah, that was it. The Provo shoreline. That was it. Then the Teton Dam. You're running the show. Me? Oh, no. Yeah, man.

So I'll just. I mean, I could show you a thousand more photos, but. Oh, I love looking at photos. Well, if you want to show, just show photos of the dam site or what, what would you show photos of? Oh, just all kinds of stuff I've been collecting from where we're going on the tour. Oh, well, yeah, I didn't do anything with Antelope Island or the shorelines you're talking about, or Shoshone Falls was going to be closed. But like I said, we're going to find an overlook. We won't be able to go into the park.

Uh-huh. And then, yeah, Bruno Canyon. So, yeah, I just got a whole collection of stuff I've been putting together because we'll share that with the tourists. Any bungee jumping off the Parine Bridge? There's, well, it's base jumping. Base jumping that they're doing. Oh. So you got a parachute. Yeah, you don't, you don't.

But, yeah, there'll be kind of a slow day in the middle because we're going to be covering a lot of territory. So we're staying in Twin Falls some of the time. So there'll be a day to just hang close there. And, yeah, people might want to do that. Oh, okay. Yeah, the guy walked up to me and asked me. So he's just kind of roaming around, you know, with some wild, evil-knievel-looking, multicolored, you know, American flag suit. You want to jump off the bridge? Yeah, he came up to me.

And you, of course, said, yeah, I would. Let's go. I was like, 250 bucks. Oh, geez. So that's pretty, pretty quick. A lot of cash. So no, I didn't do it. But as later that day or the next day, we drove by right as a guy jumped off. Oh, really? So it was pretty wild to just be driving down the road and you see a guy standing there. What the hell? And then he just jumps off. So people doing it. So a little bit of background on the disaster here.

Again, America's bicentennial year, 1976, the newly built Teton Dam in Idaho failed, unleashing a massive torrential flood into the headwaters of the Snake River. This was the last great dam disaster in America and effectively pulled the plug on the Federal Bureau of Reclamation's program of monumental dam building that had been going on for something like 75 years.

James Sherrard, one of the post-failure investigating engineers, was quoted as saying, the Teton Dam failure is one of the most important single events in the history of dam engineering.

At a meeting of the House Committee investigating the Teton Dam collapse, Congressman Leo J. Ryan of California, heading up the congressional investigation of the catastrophe, called it one of the most colossal and dramatic failures in national history. The story of this event deserves a wider telling than it has received, for its lessons are many.

Like the current predicament with the Mosul Dam, which this was at the time that they were afraid that the Mosul Dam might fail. The failure of the, which it didn't because a group of Italian engineers got there just in the nick of time and were able to salvage what was there and they prevented an outburst flood. But the failure of the Teton Dam was the result of a confluence of human errors and has a peculiar connection to another kind of humanitarian catastrophe that happened recently.

just over two years later. And Brad, I would not expect you to know this, but maybe you would, Mike. Do you remember Leo J. Ryan from California? The congressman. Congressman. What happened to him? Didn't he die at Jonestown? Yes, he was murdered at Jonestown. Yeah. And we're not going to get into that story, but at some point... I was going to say, that's a disintegration. Well, I just thought I'd mention it. He was head of that investigating committee, and two years later, he was...

murdered in Jonestown, uh, by Jim Jones, some, uh, fanatical Jim Jones follower. Yeah. He was, he was trying to leave, uh, and take some of the sick, take some of the Jonestown campers with him. And, uh, the Jonestown Leo, uh, Jim Jones's people ambushed him and killed him. Yeah. Yeah. As they were trying to get on the plane. So the Teton dam was an earthen embankment structure. And, uh,

The failure of the Teton Dam was the result of the cumulative effect of human error. The multiple purposes for which the dam was being built included agricultural irrigation, flood control, power generation, and recreation. Investigations of the Teton River Canyon for purposes of dam construction go back to the early 1930s. An impetus to undertake construction of the new dam was

came in the wake of a severe drought in the region that happened in 1961 that was then followed by a major flood the next year. The Bureau of Reclamation proposed the construction of a dam in 1963, and Congress authorized the funds the following year. After extensive surveys and core sampling throughout the 60s, a site was chosen in the lower Teton Basin in Fremont County, Idaho.

So construction of the dam began in February 1972. Specifically, the dam was constructed of five zones of different kinds of earth material installed in compacted layers, each layer performing a different function, with the central core designed to be the one that actually retained the water. At the completion, the dam's crest stood at 305 feet.

above the riverbed and its width was almost 3,200 feet. It's almost a kilometer. At the base of the dam, it was 1,700 feet wide. And when full, the reservoir would have contained 356 million cubic meters of water, equivalent to about 94 billion gallons. And the lake formed above the dam would have reached upriver nearly 17 miles.

So if you were to visualize this volume of water as a giant ice cube, take that whole volume of water that was going to be in the Teton Dam Reservoir and froze it into a cubical ice cube, each side of that cube would be 2,350 feet. And that's disregarding the coefficient of ice factor. So that was a lot of water. So one cubic meter of water weighs one metric ton.

So it is obvious that the weight of the lake when full would have been about 356 million metric tons. Uh, so then I say that in this thing that I wrote up on it, this is a considerable amount of pressure bearing on the bedrock. Uh, so, uh,

So while a number of geologists and engineers did actually express reservations about the site that they had chosen and said that the bedrock was unsuitable for dam construction, politics, politics, of course, took precedence over prudence and the project went ahead anyway.

So the main problem with the bedrock in the Teton Dam locale was that it consists of porous rhyolite and basalt. These are volcanic rocks, which any geologist will advise are not the kind of foundation upon which one wants to erect a major dam with a large reservoir behind it. Interestingly, this particular rock, called by geologists the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, T-U-F-F,

was the product of a massive eruption of Yellowstone Caldera about 2 million years before. So you see a picture of it in a second here.

This violent eruption was at least 6,000 times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. And it ejected about 600 cubic miles of dust, ash, and debris into the atmosphere. And it was this stuff from the massive eruption of Yellowstone that came down and consolidated into the bedrock that was being used, that was at the site there, that

So let's see. Okay, so now I'm going to share a screen here, and we're going to look at the bedrock. And I mean, to me, I think we'd even think that a layperson would look at this and go, wait a second, does this look like...

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With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. So there's the bedrock.

So as I say here, extreme fracturing of the bedrock is clearly displayed in this photo of the right abutment area before construction of the dam. Extensive voids were uncovered during the process of excavation. The rock is a type of rhyolite called welded tuff that forms through the lithification of volcanic ash flows. It is not a suitable bedrock for construction of a large dam and reservoir.

so the bedrock into which the zetan canyon had been eroded was composed of this highly fissured and porous rhyolite and basalt the choice therefore of a dam site itself was the first mistake

The problem was that the sites suitable for the construction of monumental dams were becoming scarce by the 1970s. At the same time, as pressure from multiple factions lobbying for all the presumed benefits to be derived from the new dam were considerable. So you can see right there what's happening.

So they got all this prep. Remember I listed what was, it was going to be power. It was going to be agriculture. It was going to be recreation. Uh, so you got all of these social forces that are, yeah, yeah, yeah. We want this. We're going to, you know, power generation, all of these, what was the fourth thing? Uh, there was four things that it named. Um, so then you had this political pressure and like it says, other suitable sites were already being used up by the 1970s. So political pressure, they went ahead anyway. Um,

I should mention that up to this point, the Bureau's record of dam building over nearly 75 years was virtually impeccable. Without a single dam failure, although there was one close call, the engineers, geologists, contractors, and other professionals in their employ were highly experienced at dam building. After all, the Bureau had built two of the great engineering wonders of the modern world, both Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam.

But this reign of success and accomplishment became compromised as the enterprise became progressively more bureaucratized and politicized with the growth of government. Teton Dam represented the tipping point, and its physical collapse parallels the economic collapse

In Venezuela, this is what, yeah, at the time I wrote this, there was an economic collapse in Venezuela, which we're still experiencing the aftereffects of because, you know, the economic collapse in Venezuela fueled the immigration and all of the Venezuelan immigrants that found their way to America and so on. But that's a huge distraction. But interestingly...

As I was writing this, that was going on. That economic collapse was just beginning in slow motion. So to me, one of the takeaways of this kind of study that we do is often there seems to be a correlation between what's happening in the social sphere, the cultural sphere, the economic sphere, and what's happening within the natural world. And when we talk about the Great Dust Bowl and drought of the 1930s, we really see that.

really this mutual feedback thing between what nature is doing and what the economy is doing. But that's a digression. Anyways, the physical collapse parallels the economic collapse in Venezuela as that nation succumbs to total bureaucratization. As I mentioned, the failure of Teton Dam marked the end of the era of monumental dam building in North America.

So yeah, over the basalt bedrock of the region, there has accumulated a very interesting and unique type of soil called luss. This mostly volcanically derived soil is extremely fertile and is widely distributed throughout the Pacific Northwest. All that is needed for luss to support abundant biological activity is the addition of water.

But much of the area over which it is found in Idaho and Washington is quite arid, and hence the numerous hydrological projects that have been undertaken throughout the Northwest, which occasioned the building of not only dams, but canals, aqueducts, and vast irrigation systems. We'll skip over some of this.

So as I explained, let's see, in the course of site preparation, contractors begin grouting operations. As I explained in an article I wrote about Mosul Dam in Iraq, grouting is a method of injecting fluidized concrete under high pressure into voids and fissures in the rocks surrounding a dam for the purpose of preventing seepage.

When the grout hardens, it forms, or is supposed to form, an impervious barricade to water penetration. In the course of excavation, it was confirmed that the bedrock adjacent to the Teton Dam site was porous, containing large voids and cavities, some of which consumed enormous quantities of grout.

In some cases, the voids were never even actually filled. Some of the grout holds extended to a depth of more than 300 feet. Large fissures and caverns were especially prevalent around the right abutment, which we're going to see the pictures of in a moment. More than 1.1 million cubic feet of grouting material was injected into the Swiss cheese-like bedrock with no end in sight.

This was more than double the amount of grout originally estimated. The decision was made to suspend grouting operations due to the accruing cost overruns. And this was mistake number three. In early June of 1973, the contractor, Morrison Knudsen, completed that diversion tunnel and rerouted the Teton River on June 8th. Implacement of the embankment material commenced in October of 1973 and

The embankment, as I said, consisted of five layers with a central core layer, the one that was to serve as the barrier to water penetration. And it was composed of friable lust. What? Over the lust core were layers of rock and clay extracted from the site and from borrow pits nearby. At its completion, the Teton Dam consumed something like 10 million cubic yards of earth and rock material.

By the beginning of 1976, the dam was for the most part complete. Officials had already begun filling the reservoir in October of 1975. The approved filling rate for a large dam reservoir was generally not permitted to exceed a maximum rise of about one foot per day. This allows the site to adjust slowly to the substantially increased pressure imposed by the weight of a large body of water.

However, in the spring of 1976, two occurrences conspired against this preferred filling rate. First, there was an unusually heavy snowpack on the Teton Mountains that winter. And second, the month of May was unusually warm. The warm weather triggered a rapid melting of the copious volume of snow which it accumulated, and that caused a rapid rise in river level.

The decision was made to capture the increased amount of meltwater, thereby accelerating the filling of the reservoir and hence the completion date for the project because the project was significantly at that point behind schedule due to the numerous delays that arose from the highly problematic site preparation. Okay. So now they're behind.

They get this big melt, accelerated melt, right? So the reservoir was allowed to fill at its natural rate rather than its controlled rate. This led to water level rise over four times greater than the recommended rate. A process that should have taken up to three years was virtually completed in that single spring of 1976.

What compounded the problem of the accelerated lake level was the fact that the outlets by which the water level could be drawn down were only partially operational. So this was major mistake number four. So in the first few days of June 1976, as the reservoir reached about 280 feet in depth behind the dam,

About 30 feet below the dam crest and about 15 feet below the overflow spillway, several springs showed up downstream from the dam, indicating that water was leaking through the bedrock base. Early in the morning of June 5th, a Morrison-Nudson worker arrived at the site to find a leak in the dam itself.

about 15 feet above the stream bed, close to where it abutted the right canyon wall as one was looking downstream. The measured rate of leakage was about 20 to 30 cubic feet per second. The time of the discovery of this leak was between 7.30 and 8 a.m., and this was the beginning of the end of the Teton Dam. Around 9 a.m., the project manager, Robert Robison,

made a closer inspection of the leak and discovered that its flow rate had increased to nearly 50 cubic feet per second. He also noticed a second smaller leak issuing from the abutment rock near its contact with the embankment, about 130 feet below the crest. Somewhere between 9.30 and 10 a.m., a wet spot appeared on the downstream face of the dam, no more than about 20 feet from the abutment.

The wet spot quickly turned into active seepage and a hole appeared. At this point, it was clear that action must be taken. As the hole was growing larger, two bulldozers were dispatched to push bouldering material into the hole, but it continued to erode faster than they were able to fill it. Now I've got a series of photographs we're about to look at here. At 10.30 a.m.,

Teton Dam project officials alerted the sheriff's offices in both Madison and Fremont counties to begin preparing for the onset of a devastating flood in the downstream area. At about 11 o'clock a.m., one of the dozers started to slide into the hole. The second dozer operator worked frantically to pull it out, but his effort was futile for the hole enlarged as fast as the first dozer could be pulled back.

Finally, both dozers, bulldozers, slid into the expanding hole and were swept away in the torrent. Sometime between 11 and 1130, this is still in the morning now, project officials called the sheriff's office and informed them that people living in the flood path must be evacuated immediately. As the call was being made, a whirlpool appeared in the reservoir just above, uh,

just upstream of the swiftly expanding leak. Two more bulldozers made a frantic and futile effort to shovel riprap into the whirlpool, but it was sucked down as fast as they could dump it in. The whirlpool quickly expanded from a few feet in diameter to about 20 feet as the hole in the dam face continued to grow. At about three minutes before noon, a large section of the dam crest gave way.

and a massive wall of water poured through the opening. The roiling torrent of some 80 billion gallons carried away about 4 million cubic yards of embankment material that now mantles the floor of the canyon for miles downstream. The pumping station and powerhouse at the base of the dam were completely obliterated and buried by the mass of water and mud.

Time Magazine, for June 21st, 1976, ran a story recounting the experiences of a family who witnessed the entire collapse from start to finish. Dale Howard was a geography professor at Minot State College in North Dakota who visited the site that Saturday morning with his family. And while he was snapping pictures from an observation platform, which are some of the pictures we're going to see, he noticed, quote,

That darn hole started growing quite slowly at first, forming a small waterfall down one side. It still looked like just a minor leak. As Howard continued shooting, the collapse began to unfold before his eyes, and he was able to record the color pictures documenting the progressive failures that we're about to look at. When the two bulldozers were sucked into the hole, it became apparent that Howard and his family were witnesses to something truly extraordinary.

He commented, my wife was excited and my kids were crying because they thought the world was coming to an end. It was really frightening. If I had had a weak heart, maybe it would have stopped. The hole was enormous and huge chunks were breaking off. By this time, you could see daylight through the hole. It was almost like a natural bridge. Then the whole thing fell and it was just a raging torrent. Howard goes on to describe that when this raging torrent hit the power plant,

that it just disintegrated. The water picked up a huge oil tank like a cork, and away it went. There was a beautiful grove of cottonwood trees down below, and they were snapped off like matchsticks. Later, I could see the water out on the plain. It was like a surrealistic picture. As the torrent of water surged downriver, residents of the towns lying in its path—Sugar City, Teton, and Newdale—

scrambled to evacuate, having to leave in such a rush that most of their belongings were left behind. Luckily, Teton and Newdale were on higher ground and spared the worst ravages of the flood wave. Another town, Wilford, did not fare so well, receiving the full force of the flood. It was literally wiped off the face of the map. When the surging flood wave reached Sugar City at about one o'clock, it was 15 feet deep.

The largest city in the path of the flood was Rexburg. As the flood swept into Rexburg, it struck a logging mill on the outskirts of town, and hundreds of massive logs were picked up by the powerful currents and became battering rams that smashed and destroyed buildings by the hundreds. Can you imagine witnessing that? God! It took about eight hours for the reservoir to empty.

35,000 people had to be evacuated within hours to minutes. Hundreds of families had their homes obliterated. 14 people lost their lives. Several thousand were injured. Irrigation canals that brought water to farms and crops were choked with debris and rendered useless.

Highways, railroad lines, and power lines were damaged or destroyed. Seven bridges were destroyed. Cars, trucks, trailer homes, and whole houses were swept away. An estimated 400,000 acres of farmland were inundated. An estimated 13,000 to 20,000 head of cattle were drowned and swept away. And in the aftermath, their corpses littered the flood pathway.

The floodwaters cut a swath of destruction for some 80 miles along the Teton and Snake Valleys from the dam site to American Falls Reservoir. Some estimates place the value of the flood damage as high as $2 billion. Now that's in 1976 dollars. The devastation was extreme as the following images demonstrate. We're just about to look at. Let's see. We'll see this, but here's the thing.

that gets really interesting to me. And maybe I have something about that here. There's a whole series of monumental dams along the Snake River. And the first one that this floodwater was going to reach was the one at American Falls Reservoir. So the engineers were afraid that when that water, when that surge reached that dam,

it was going to overtop the dam at American Falls, it would fail and all the volume of American Falls Reservoir would be added to the flood. And they were literally fearing that it was possibly going to be a domino effect all the way down to Snake. And then, of course, all that water is moving down to Columbia. And if that had happened, and this was a realistic possibility,

And if that were to happen, that would have been obviously the greatest disaster in American history, bar none. You know, it would have been in the class by itself. So let's get to the pictures here. Okay, yeah, here we go. The disaster that occurred was tragic enough in its own right. The floodwaters drowned some 80 miles of the Teton and Snake River valleys. But it could have been worse, a lot worse.

The Teton River is a tributary to the Snake River. About 100 miles downstream from Teton Dam lay American Falls Reservoir on the Snake. This reservoir contains about a half cubic mile of water. In 1976, the dam retaining that reservoir was known to be severely deteriorated and in need of replacement.

Officials rightly feared that if a substantial volume of water rushing down the Teton River were to overwhelm American Falls Reservoir, this old decrepit dam would probably fail, adding another half cubic mile of water to the flood. This augmented flood surge would then race down the Snake River Canyon about 30 miles until it reached Lake Walcott, held in by the Minidoka Dam.

This dam would then likely fail, adding the water of Lake Walcott and swelling the flood even further. Between the Minidoka Dam and the confluence of the Snake River and the Columbia River lay eight more dams with their reservoirs. Officials and engineers began to panic as they realized the potential for all of these dams to fail one after another like dominoes. But that's not all.

Along the Columbia, between the Snake River and Portland, lay another four dams, with large reservoirs which likely would have been overtopped. Had this worst-case scenario occurred, it is possible, possibly, could have been one of the greatest disasters of modern times, no doubt the greatest disaster in American history. In desperation, officials raced to open the outlet works of American Falls Reservoir,

full bore in an effort to drain as much water as possible before the flood torrent arrived. However, one of the same factors that contributed to the failure of Teton Dam in the first place now acted to mitigate the extreme disaster of multiple flood, multiple dam failures. And this was the porosity of the rhyolite basalt bedrock.

By the time the flood surge reached American Falls, it had substantially diminished in force and volume because much of the water had soaked into the highly permeable bedrock. American Falls Reservoir was able to absorb the additional volume of water and an extreme calamity was averted. Two years later, the dam at American Falls was replaced. Thankfully, the worst case scenario did not materialize.

However, had it done so, it would have initiated one of the massive floods that swept, it would have imitated one of the massive floods that swept down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean at the end of the last ice age. A scenario of multiple dams failing one after another as they are overwhelmed by an ever-increasing flood volume might at first seem too extreme to be realistic, but even such a flood as that would be minuscule when contrasted with some of nature's mighty floods of the past.

The deluges that came through the Columbia at the end of the last ice age were among the most massive floods ever documented to have occurred in the entire history of the earth, which, you know, everybody knows. But here's the thing. I think we would be looking at a very similar process because, you know, the conventional view is you have glacial lakes held in by ice dams. Well, the assumption is, you know, where is the temporal framework? Where's the chronology of that?

I would guess that rather than being separated by years and decades, you might have had multiple dam failures, but one right after another. Almost, that's why I'm saying that this might have imitated the process at the end of the last ice age. So let's go back now and we'll go through this amazing set of pictures here that I've pulled together. We've seen the first one. Now let's go to the dam before failure.

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Well, there you can see some of the dozers and heavy equipment up on top of the dam there. So this is, it says, yeah, May of 76. And we'll scroll down. So here, okay, this is not, there we go. Okay, so this, as it says, aerial photo of the Teton Dam as it was nearing completion. This was taken on September 26, 1975. This would be the right abutment over here. And of course, you can see there's,

No really feeling of the reservoir yet on the upside of the dam. Here's the spillway. Star marks the approximate position near the right abutment where the leak began. Well, I guess the star didn't come through, but it's right over here in this area. Yeah. Note the power and pumping station at the base of the dam right down here.

Alright, so there's looking downstream. So here you can see the reservoir is starting to fill. This is May 21st, 1976, 16 days before the failure. Note the Snake River Plain beyond the mouth of the Teton Canyon. That's this area out here.

failure occurred near the boundary between the embankment and the abutment on the right side of the dam. Looking downstream, arrow points to the right abutment. So this is where the major failure occurred right here. And there we see image taken about 10.45 a.m. The wet spot has turned into a substantial leak, and you see the muddy water beginning to enter the valley downstream. The pumping station and power stations are still unscathed. You see them over here.

But not for long. Arrow points to a bulldozer. Well, I guess some of the formatting didn't come through, but you can see right up here. That's a bulldozer making its way toward the leak. And right here you can see there's the leak. Right here, and they're dumping rubble, bouldery rubble, thinking that that's going to stem the leak. After vainly trying to fill, break an embankment of Teton Dam to the

cat operators back toward safety as their bulldozers slide into the widening gap. Look at this down here. I'm just standing there though. Get the freak out, man. Hey, look at that. There goes my dozer, my cat. Yeah. Look at that. Jesus getting sucked in. Let's go to the next one. Okay. So here we go. Image taken about 1120 AM. This one was, uh,

That doesn't give us the time. And that's just the teacher that happened to be there in the observatory parking lot across the way. And here, yeah, as you can see, the water is rising against the walls of the pumping station right down here. Holy crap. The hole has continued to enlarge, eating its way back into the mass of the dam. Here it is about to breach the dam crest.

Look at there. Now the breach of the dam crest is beginning. Look at that water that's gushing through here. The leak has turned into a turbulent rush of muddy water. A large section of the dam has collapsed right here. Look at this. So here you can see there's a powerful torrent of sediment choked water rushes through the gap, and the power station and pump house have been buried beneath the mass of mud and water. Aerial view of the dam breach at peak discharge.

Brad, I wonder if we could, I don't know if I have in here the peak discharge of this flow. I'd really like to know that. We could find it, I bet. And here's the Teton Dam, the day after failure looking upstream. Note that the power station is completely buried. Now, am I correct that all this is gone now and only this remains?

this mound of material still remains. Just that center Hill. Yeah. The other side's gone too. I guess they took that out because they feared that that could collapse. And there we have tsunami like flood waves sweeping over farmland as it exits the Teton Canyon and spreads out over the snake river plain. Uh,

This doomed farm is about to be engulfed. Can you imagine the feelings of the family that sees this wave oncoming as they scramble to evacuate their farm, their farm to utter ruin? So this, you can see, this is very instructive because this is what floods do. When they exit a confined channel, they spread out. Now, of course, when they spread out, they lose velocity. And that's why you see delta fans and boulder bars and things like that

deposited at places where confined flows open up into basins or more unrestricted flows. I got a number for you here. Okay. Ooh, my power is dropping. There's big storms coming through here. Yeah. Peak dam failure outflow of 2,300,000 cubic feet per second. 2,300,000. Okay. So I'm going to put...

Bonneville flood, divide that by 2,300,000. So basically the Bonneville flood was about 18 times bigger than this at its peak. So this time's about 18. However, to get to 40 million. Yeah. Yeah. Like where this flood lasted a day, the Bonneville flood lasted for at least several months. Okay.

The raging flood overtakes a farm, which is in the process of being washed away. So if this was your farm, this would really suck. There you have drowned vast tracts of prime agricultural land were drowned. Yeah, look at this. The swath of destruction reached up to eight miles in width. Let's see that. Rexburg, Idaho. After the flood, it lies about 14 miles southwest of Teton Dam. Brigham Young University, then Rick's College in the foreground.

was elevated enough to escape flooding and was utilized by the Mormon church to provide food and shelter to thousands of displaced and homeless flood victims. So there's a museum in Rexburg now. Typical street scene in Rexburg as the flood surge passed through town. Wow. Drowned neighborhoods, you know. So here you got neighbors out navigating streets by boat. Yeah, I was 25 years old when this happened.

The inundation of Rexburg. You can see out here, cars almost completely submerged. Downtown Rexburg. Residents witnessing the drowning of their town. One hour to evacuate. Can you imagine? So the aftermath. Let's see what the swath of destruction. Yeah, how would you like to see that rush of water coming on, you know, carrying all of that? Jeez.

Many irrigation canals that brought water to thousands of acres of crops were choked with debris and rendered useless. Here you can see a piece of the irrigation canal there, and then it's just completely, like it says, choked. So the flood left a massive thick layer of mud and debris in its wake. Whole communities were submerged and laid to waste. So yeah, just left the whole town with a thick layer of mud. All the streets, all the property destroyed.

I've been seeing it myself. Yep. One of the many houses swept off its foundation by the force of the water. Downtown Rexburg. Yeah. First, the damage of the swiftly moving water followed by the deposition of a thick layer of mud over everything. Railroad tracks. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, the amount of topsoil stripped away can be gauged from the separation of the railway tracks from the post-flood ground surface. Whoa. Yeah, look at this guy sitting here.

wonder what's going through his mind now if he's still with us he probably remembers this day well at least it didn't get in my truck look at this one a homeowner sitting on the stepping foundation of what had been her house utterly swept away by the torrent note the scoured and pock-marked character of the landscape yes and what kind of feelings would you be having at that moment all of the streets of rexburg and sugar city were covered with wreckage and mud

massive damage to interest look at this this bridge collapsed the railroad tracks um yeah in the effort to understand the causes and origins of this monumental failure there were a number of conclusions arrived at by the various investigating committees no final agreement was ever reached as to any single cause for the failure

But I think it obvious from the results of the various investigations that it was the unique confluence of factors that interacted cumulatively and pushed the system from relative stability to catastrophic instability. From the time of the first indication of a problem to the collapse was only about five hours.

In his very useful reference on the failure of earth embankment dams, selected case histories of dam failures and accidents caused by internal erosion, author David Maidema presents 10 case histories of failure, including Teton Dam. In his summary of this event, he presents the seven most likely mechanisms that may have initiated the failure. I won't dwell on the technical details of the various failure mechanisms, but Maidema

sums up the general understanding that has emerged when he states, while the exact cause of the failure is not known, it is commonly accepted that a concentrated flow of high-pressure reservoir water passed through open cracks in the rock upstream of the key trench on the right abutment and eroded the very erodible silt material, silt fill material, which was then carried into large open cracks downstream of the key trench.

This very erodible silt-filled material is the aforementioned luss used in the core layer. The key trench referred to is, in this case, a large, roughly 70-foot-deep slot excavated into the bedrock below both abutments that was supposed to act as an additional barrier to water penetration well below the mass of the dam proper. Okay.

As pointed out by F. Ross Peterson, in the Teton Dam disaster, tragedy, or triumph, 95% of the people affected by the flood were Mormons, whose presence in the Upper Snake River Valley goes back to the 1880s. In this semi-arid region, the lifeblood of their farms and communities has always been water. Most Mormons in the area therefore favored construction of the dam.

However, it was this shared heritage that dramatically lessened the severity of post-flood recovery efforts. Interestingly, as Peterson describes in the above-referenced work, quote, the similar religious beliefs of the valley residents created an immediate folklore of premonitions, miracles, and divine intervention. This phenomena is worth dwelling upon, and I don't know how much we want to get into that

But it's really interesting, just like in many of these disasters, we find there is this almost metaphysical component to it. And that was definitely not missing from this. So in the interest of time, we probably won't go into that. And maybe we can do another cover that in another episode.

Sure. But this was, um, yeah, people love the stories of that from the, from the Peshtigo fires and everything. Oh yeah. There's similar stuff right here. Yeah. Man, choose your weapons. Volunteers go to work. And this is a good, this is an amazing part of the story. People of all ages came to lend a hand. See in the aftermath of this disaster, people came together, spontaneous cooperation in time of need.

Now, no government bureaucracy saying you have to fill out this form, you have to follow this procedure, these rules, these regulations. No, people just came out spontaneously and did what they had to do. And there was, between the disaster and the recovery efforts, there was minimal bureaucracy. So, yeah, yeah.

The central creed of the LDS church is disaster preparedness. The efficiency of the family self-help and church-operated welfare systems ensured that almost no one went hungry. Now, to me, this is important because what we have here is an alternate to a government bureaucracy handing out relief and welfare. And one has to ask this question. If the government was not monopolizing that whole process, which it does, clearly, then

What could have emerged or what still could emerge as an alternate? If local communities are left, it's up to you, you guys, the states, the local communities, the counties, to be prepared. And the LDS Church shows us that it can be done. As it was, the leaders of the church and the local government leaders were frequently the same people.

the effectiveness of the locally managed and coordinated response left federal agencies free to focus on restoring electrical power and transportation and communication lines. There we go. General James Brooks, who was director of disaster services for Idaho commented, the church organization functioned marvelously under these kinds of conditions. And I'd have to say more effectively than most anything I've seen, uh,

We'll cover that kind of dimension of it in another episode. But it says here, Teton Dam after failure. So here we're looking downstream. Here's where the right abutment failed. Like Brad said, this has all been removed now. Note the obvious scouring along the lower section of the canyon wall right over here. You see that here you can see the high watermark very clearly etched into the canyon wall. Oh, yeah.

This is not a newspaper article. You wrote all this. I wrote all this, yeah. Yeah. A view of the canyon below the dam taken in 1977. The Teton River, and this is valuable too. The Teton River has cut a new channel through the massive flood debris that chokes the canyon floor. This debris is composed of the roughly 4 million cubic yards of dam material that was swept downstream by the discharging floodwaters.

Scouring and erosion on the canyon walls from the passage of the flood torrents is readily visible. You see it right along here. These features can yield insight into the great deluvial catastrophes of the past. Absolutely, they can.

Well, and just in case people wonder in the back of their head the whole time, the Teton river, yes, comes out of the grand Tetons. Yes. And the border with Wyoming and we can see them from the site there on the horizon, the, the craggy jagged mountaintops there that are the grand Tetons in that range. Uh, so yeah, we will be able to see those, but that's definitely connected. Yeah. So I think we'll conclude with this. Um,

There's another important lesson to be learned from this particular event. A well-prepared, self-reliant people spontaneously, voluntarily, and harmoniously rose to the challenge, came together to alleviate the worst excesses of the disaster, to render aid and assistance, and to provide food and shelter to thousands of victims. It must be acknowledged that local, state, and federal officials responded effectively as well.

But it must also be recognized that the ethos of government was even then undergoing decline as evidenced by the failure of the Teton Dam project itself. Nevertheless, it still retained enough individuals endowed with the traditional values of honor, self-reliance, and government as servant of the people to rise to the demands and challenges of the occasion.

And it must also be recognized that the deterioration and bureaucratization of government has continued a pace since then. And as it has expanded in scope and power, it has declined in efficiency and accountability. This was clearly demonstrated by the incompetent federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

And I would say also with the response to Hurricane Helena as well, which this was written well before Hurricane Helena. So, yeah, we get into that. There's an important reason why I end up with this out here, the Saturn rocket, which was left to rust, because it's kind of a metaphor, an icon of what's happening to America's infrastructure right now as we speak.

And unless something is done in the next decade, we're going to see more massive failures of America's infrastructure. And that's something that needs to be addressed. And this takes us directly into the realm of politics and what national priorities are. But my mind is, is how many events is it going to take? Perhaps even more events on the scale of the Teton Dam disaster,

before we change our orientation to how we deal with things like this. So anyways, I think that's probably where we'll wrap it up for now. Unless Brad, you have something else to say? No, that's a good summation. That's an amazing story and great that you wrote all that up. So yeah, I'll add some photos and yeah, quite an episode here back with Cosmographia. Keep up with Randall and Square in the Circle.

And the big picture he's doing with Beckett and, uh, I'm, I'm looking at reviving the radio show. I did. Oh, I first met with Randall and he said, yeah, I've never done that, but I think I ought to eventually be doing more of those things. And yes, you have. So yeah, I was actually considering bringing it back on nine 28, which was, uh,

a pertinent date for my life in many ways and ended up again. That's when the flood was. So there was no debut of the aware state update, but yeah, coming soon, maybe the summer. So too much. We're going to be visiting. Keep silent. Yeah. We're going to be visiting the site of the Teton dam failure. So we're going to get to see a lot of, well, what's interesting. We'll get to see what the intervening decades have done.

to begin to restore some of these features that were so obvious in that year, say after the disaster. So how many years has it been? Almost a half a century, 49 years. Yeah. 49 years. So I'm looking forward to that visit during our Bonneville flood tour. Absolutely. Yeah, it's very interesting and there's plenty of places to roam around. So yeah, we'll spend...

all morning there one day okay gonna be a good one now are there any i guess there's no uh visitor center anything there is there no place where we might go in and talk to a no there's nobody geologist or anything huh okay no i mean we could probably find somebody in rexburg at the museum but i hadn't set that up uh but yeah easy enough to make a call

But, yeah, I mean, there's a parking lot and, you know, the round overlook. Like, it was set up for people like any dam to visit and, you know, check out this impressive new construction here, you know. So that stuff is still there. Abandoned, but, yeah, it's still blacked up and, you know, a lot of graffiti. But...

A couple of wild goats actually I ran into the first time, but yeah, you can just roam around people, like I said, riding their, their bikes and motorbikes and down in there, uh, four wheeling and fishing. And so, yeah, it's plenty accessible. Cool. Yep. All right. Well, it's late here. See you guys. Yeah. Likewise. Welcome back Mike. Uh, thanks for doing this Randall. And I think we'll have for another one. There will be some future episodes that we do with the serpent brothers. They've indicated their willingness, uh,

to come off their high horses and, you know, now that they're famous. All right, don't go slandering anybody else. Rock stars. Well, they want to get us on their show too. Well, hey, I'd love to do that. Let's do that. It's been a long time. Yep, yep. Yeah, well, I've had some interactions with Russ lately, which were good. And then, of course, I got, hey, I had a lot of fun with him at the, was it the last Cosmic Summit where I was able to jam with him.

I need to get their album and listen to the drum section. And so rather than just, you know, ad-libbing it, really kind of know, you know, because it does make a difference. Yeah, it's really well done. It's great music. I've really enjoyed it. I've got the LP right still in the plastic cover, so I have to listen to the MP3s. But yeah, it's really good if you haven't been listening to it.

Well, you know, doing that cosmic summit, you brought that up. So that is coming up, uh, also same, same time as previous years, right around the, uh, the summer solstice and father's day is right there. Second, third week, a week of June. So you'll, you'll be there headlining and, uh, yeah, it's a big crowd of speakers. Oh yeah. It's going to be some interesting discussions and inner ideas exchange. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be in the same hotel.

That's right. Which was really nice. Yeah. We'll put the link in the description here. Oh, okay. Good. Yeah. Help that crowd out. Yeah. Lots going on. So we'll do this again. Hey, let's do it again. All right. A couple of phone calls and a little agreement from the storm was missing me. So my power didn't shut down and yeah. In the books. Coming soon. All right, gentlemen. Mike, good to see you again. You too. I'm glad everything's normal with you.

That's important. Yeah. What would life be without a little bit of normal? A little bit of normality. Normal guy. Well, you, Mike, are our standard of normality. You got to balance me out. I appreciate it. And Brad, wherever you are, take care. Cheers, brother. Yeah, man. About to hit the road. Tour coming up.

All right. Shutting it down. Great show, guys. Good night. All right. I guess I'll shut it down. Later, Cosmographians. Yep. Endo. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need.

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