Left above: The rocks that appear to be six-sided man-made objects appear to be columnar basalt, a naturally occuring rock. We'll see some of this in Great pressures from the west shattered the ancient sea bed. The result was the Rocky Mountains.

The Rockies have a long and turbulent history. They emerged not in a single abrupt event, but grew fitfully over a hundred million years.

As colosal forces deep within the earth strained against each other, pressure from the west forced the earth's crust to buckle and heave upward and eastward into a complex jumble.place later in the rock formation in the Hells Canyon pictures.