Specifically, there are very strong parallels between it and the Gilgamesh flood myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
Altogether, it does not surprise me that tales of great floods appear in cultures across the world. It could well be that they relate to different geological events around the world.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
You can clearly see in some areas where the smaller hills and mountains kinda look like "islands" and we have a very nice aquifer due to it.
And yes...supposedly the native tribes which were in the path all the way down the Columbia have stories about it.
https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Aq...
The Columbia River Gorge was carved out in two weeks.
This seemed interesting, so I looked into it, and I'm seeing multiple sources saying it was many floods over a few millennia (with one large initial one from Lake Missoula).
About 1800 years ago, the Columbia Basin became flooded when an ice dam broke at Lake MIssoula in Western Montana. This lake help approximately 600 cubic miles of water. Boulders were tossed around the outlet of the break. Others were carried in icebergs as far as Western Oregon towards the Pacific Ocean. The water flowed at appoximately 60mph. It is believed that it took 2-3 days for this water to drain.
During a period of 2500 years, there were believed to be as many as 100 floods that scoured the Gorge area. These were some of the largest documented floods occuring on the planet and in geological history.[1]
The 1800 is likely supposed to be 18,000 years ago, as this other link says essentially the same thing but at the time brame of 18,000 - 15,000 years ago.[2]
That said, neither source their facts well, so it's not out of the question that one is using the other or they are using some other source, and they are wrong and referencing wrong information in a chain, so I would consider a reputable source one way or the other as more definitive.
1: http://www.gorgeconnection.com/how-the-gorge-was-formed.php
2: https://www.pdxmonthly.com/travel-and-outdoors/2012/05/gorge...
Recent evidence suggests a meteor or comet strike in the Canadian ice sheet, at start of the 1200-year Younger Dryas cold spell, that could have melted enough water, and appears responsible also for the simultaneous extinction of 32+ genera of large North American mammals (including camels, horses, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, cheetahs, giant sloths, mastodons and mammoths), as well as the Clovis culture, at the same instant, and the Younger Dryas itself.
That evidence includes shocked minerals and a platinum abundance spike found in the correct layer of the Greenland ice sheet, and in earth at sites throughout North America and as far afield as Syria and South Africa.
The Flood was a worldwide series of events throughout that time. The Fertile Crescent has been important for barely the last 13,000.
The modern humans that went to Asia largely stuck to the cost, and started on that route some millennia earlier than the modern humans that settled the Levant. Pre modern humans took that route far earlier, and there's growing evidence our ancestor and cousin species preceded them on it.