Drumheller Channels

The Drumheller Channels are what the floods did where they could not run straight. Forced around the nose of the Frenchman Hills, the water braided through the basalt into hundreds of steep-sided buttes and basins, with some of the finest columnar basalt anywhere, and in 1986 the National Park Service made the channels a National Natural Landmark.

For most of the time since the floods, the basins were dry. The water in them now is leakage. The Columbia Basin Project sent its first irrigation water in 1951, and almost at once canals, pipes and fields began to leak; the water table rose, and lakes, ponds and marshes appeared in low ground. O'Sullivan Dam, an earthfill embankment more than three and a half miles long, holds Potholes Reservoir along the channels' north side, and the potholes south of it filled from below and took the name Seep Lakes. By 1980 the basin had at least twenty times the wetland it had before the project.

The Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, set aside in 1944, takes in the channels south of the reservoir. In the springs of 1950 and 1951 a graduate student hired to count birds where the reservoir would go saw three sandhill cranes. By the 2000s biologists put the spring stopover at around 25,000, most of the Pacific Coast population, and Othello started a crane festival in 1998. In 2003 the Interior Secretary acknowledged that more efficient irrigation could dry the refuge's wetlands up.