running nearly parallel to the OWL from Victoria, B.C., southeast to the Cascade foothills to a point northeast of Seattle, is notable as the contact between the Coast Range block of oceanic crust to the west and the Cascades block of pre-Cenozoic continental crust to the east. It appears to connect with the more southerly oriented right-lateral Rattlesnake Mountain Fault Zone (RMFZ) straddling Rattlesnake Mountain (near North Bend), which shows a similar deep-seated contact between different kinds of basement rock. At the southern end of Rattlesnake Mountain – exactly where the first lineament of the OWL is encountered – at least one strand of the RMFZ (the others are hidden) turns to run by Cedar Falls and up the Cedar River. Other faults to the south also show a similar turn, suggesting a general turning or bending across the OWL, yet such a bend is not apparent in the pattern of physiographic features that express the OWL. With awareness that the Seattle Fault and the RMFZ are the edges of a large sheet of material which is moving north, there is a distinct impression that these faults, and even some of the topographical features, are flowing around the corner of the Snoqualmie Valley. If it seems odd that a mountain should "float" around a valley: bear in mind that while the surface relief is about three-quarters of a kilometer (half a mile) in height, the material flowing could be as much as eighteen kilometers deep. (The analogy of icebergs moving around a submerged sandbar is quite apt.) It is worth noting that Cedar Butte – a minor prominence just east of Cedar Falls – is the southwesternmost exposure in the region of some very old Cretaceaous (pre-Cenozoic) metamorphic rock. It seems quite plausible that there is some well-founded and obdurate obstruction at depth, around which the shallower and younger sedimentary formations are flowing. In such a context the observed arcuate fault bends would be very natural. Broader context It is generally assumed that the pattern of the OWL is a manifestation of some deeper physical structure or process (the "ur-OWL"), which might be elucidated by studying the effects it has on other structures. As has been shown, study of features that should interact with OWL has yielded very little: a tentative age range (between 45 and 17 million years), suggestions that the ur-OWL arises from deep in the crust, and