Wrong question. The entire region started to uplift about 2 million years ago. The river cut down through the basalt as the area uplifted. The same king of process created the Colorado river canyons as the Colorado Plateau uplifted, complete with entrenched meanders in the Canyonlands region - meanders typically only form in areas of low gradient - the uplift entrenched the meanders that were in place when the uplift started.
“Wrong question.”
Wrong area! I would have used the example of the Columbia River Basin in eastern Washington and the huge floods from ancient Lake Missoula when the ice dam(s) failed. Pretty amazing stuff. “Ripple marks” that are 5 miles long and 100’s of feet tall. Of course doesn’t say anything about the young earth creation version, but does show that not everything in geology is gradual.
Then you say the gorge was cut before any uplift?
The “Lake Misoula” flood used to be called the Bretz Flood after pioneering geologist J. Harlan Bretz who was the first to use aircraft surveying in the 1920’s to analyse large geological land forms. He hypothesized a wall of water 1/4 mile high scouring the Washington/Idoaho/Montana scablands and pouring into Utah to create the Great Salt Lake. For his troubles he was ridiculed and vilified by his peers, refused access to journals, forced from his job and generally made a pariah in his profession. It wasn’t until the 1970’ was his work given formal recognition by academia, but ONLY after the fantasy of a “glacier lake Misoula” presumably broke through its fantasized “ice dam”
and traveled East to West.
Bretz’s hypothesis had the water rushing in from the Pacific Ocean to do it’s sculpting work. He also cites many strings of sediment in parallel lines as though a huge body of sediment and gravel carrying water sloshed back and forth while trapped in the Northwest scablands basin before draining into Salt Lake.
As long as the establishment geologists had a non-global catastrophist rationale for the glaring evidence that a huge flood did occur, they could relax and belatedly offer Bretz the Geological Association of America’s Penrose award of merit, which, I’m happy to say, Bretz told them to shove up their ass.
American Indian author and U. of Colorado professor of anthropology, Vine Deloria, in his later book “Red Earth, White Lies”, tells of Indian myths of the “day the OCEANS took the people away”, ie., a wall of water coming from the West. These Klingit and Kwakiutl myths also are part of the same story cycle that include the Mt. St. Helens like eruption of Mt. Mazama into the 3 Sisters peaks in Central East Oregon, a synchronous event that implies a more far ranging catastrophe that included great geological upheaval beyond flooding. Deloria also attacks uniformitarian ideas of the extinction of most animal species of North America being due to human hunting and predation as well as the central anthropological pillar of the so-called Bearing Straight Migration of peoples North through thousands of miles of inhospitable frozen wasteland before heading south through North America. Good book.
Also, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies- http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/resource.htm, A british group of peer review journal academicians, has much new information on recent evidence for post-glacial period catastrophic events.
Comet Shoemaker-Levey gave uniformitarians direct non-deniable evidence that catastrophism caused by extra-terrestrial objects is for real and that the Biblical flood myth is but one of thousands from cultures around the world that tell of the same series of horrendous extinction events in recent times.