Good to know. It has been bugging me for a while which way it was flowing.

I think I see what you're getting at, though:  Assuming normal flow, it looks weird for the river to have picked its way *through* the mountain range like that as if it knew that the ocean was on the other side, and to have _not_ picked its way going the other way where it doesn't have such a mountainous barrier to cross.   

How could it happen that way, if mountains are created by large scale geologic upthrust and not lifted up point-by-point at their peaks?   How could it happen that way, if passes and valleys between mountains are generally higher up than plateaus, especially plateaus that do not seem to have a cliff on the side where they meet the ocean?


One way for it to happen is to have a breakthrough-type event where a large historical lake finds an underground seep of soft rock to tunnel through, and then the high speed water flow simply eats through the sides and top of the tunnel until there is no top to the tunnel.     Happens all the time when old sea beds are turned into mountains, like in southern Europe for example.    This, of course, begs the question: what is on the other side of the western sea jamming those mountains up, like Europe has Africa slamming into it?