NINEMILE - Western Montana's history has literally been shaped by nature since Glacial Lake Missoula's floodwaters created the valleys we know today.
Missoula's Natural History Center held a field trip to see how soil shows us not only the past but the future, too.
"I've driven by this thousands of times and just stopping here today for a minute was absolutely fascinating," rock enthusiast John Smith said.
Watch to learn more about Glacial Lake Missoula:
The field day took participants like Smith back in time to Ninemile over 12,000 years ago.
"We're at the bottom of Lake Missoula," geologist and president of the Missoula chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute Jim Shelden stated.
Glacial Lake Missoula covered thousands of miles of the Pacific Northwest, including the Ninemile area, where Shelden says the lake sat still for years.
"These are very fine grain sediments, which tells us the lake wasn't moving," Shelden said, noting that the sediments in Ninemile would have been around 600 feet underwater.
Not only that, but when the lake's ice dam broke, water surged through Montana.
"Sixty miles an hour water flow, that's mind-boggling," Smith shared.
Those floods shaped the peaks and valleys we know today.
"It put a signature on the Northwest," Shelden said. "All of the transportation routes follow the leveling. In many cases, the deposits, the sediments from Lake Missoula, determine what you could grow and where you could grow."
Now that the lake is gone, we see what it left behind.
"It left us with a very nice, fertile place with a good aquifer," Smith detailed.
Even on the side of the road, years of history is stacked on top of each other.
"A verve is a couplet of two little tiny layers. The dark layer is interpreted to be the winter layer. The light layer is interpreted to be the summertime layer. The two together is one year," Shelden explained.
Plus, looking at the old layers can give us insight into the future.
"You can see and interpret what it was. Then, you look at your modern-day climates and say what happened around here the last time we had a climate similar to what we're seeing," Shelden offered. "That's how we make our guesses as to what we should and shouldn't be doing for the short term."
Shelden says that anyone looking to understand the transformations of tomorrow has a library readily available all around them.
"The different outcrops are the books. The varves are the pages," Shelden stated.
