Let us compare rocks. Here’s a dry basalt flow at Chasm.

The river that cut through it is gone.

Painted Chasm

Here’s a rock  halfway across the mountains, above the Fraser Fault.

Spirit Caves

The river that cut through it is gone, but a small river remains in its bed. It is called The Fraser.

Here’s a dry fall in the Grand Coulee.

This water is gone, too. Here’s a glimpse of the vanished river from the mouth of one of the Lake Lenore Caves. The water in the lake is largely seepage from Banks Lake, the Grand Coulee Dam’s irrigation storage pond.

Vast amounts of water formed this dry land. Now there is the absence of water in its place.

Turtle Ridge, Vernon

It’s not that there isn’t water here…

The Glacier That Cut This Channel is Gone

… but that acouple of kilometres down from the peaks to Okanagan Lake creates an air pressure increase of close to 25%: pressure that pushes off the wet, low pressure air that flows above it. Those are our rivers now, high up.

They are, effectively, held up by the mountains their ancestors once carved. Here, in the mountains, we actually live in the mountains, and that’s pretty cool.