Where the water goes
In the Rocky Mountain Trench of British Columbia, between the Purcells and the Rockies, there is a small lake most people drive past. Columbia Lake is an unlikely place for a great river to begin. But this is where the Columbia starts its twelve-hundred-mile run to the sea.
At the south end of the lake, at a place called Canal Flats, the Kootenay River comes down out of the mountains and passes within about a mile of the young Columbia. For a moment the two rivers are close enough to touch. Then they turn away. The Columbia heads north. The Kootenay heads south into Montana and Idaho, and the two spend hundreds of miles apart, each cutting its own way through different country, before the Kootenay bends back north and joins the Columbia at Castlegar.
A few hundred miles to the south, a creek starts on the slopes of Moscow Mountain, near a patch of forest called Idler's Rest. Paradise Creek runs through Moscow, across farmland, and into Pullman, where it meets the Palouse River. The Palouse drops nearly two hundred feet over Palouse Falls, then empties into the Snake. The Snake carries it the rest of the way to the Columbia.
Every drop in this story — the glacier melt of the Kootenay, the lake water at the Columbia's source, the runoff from a creek most people have never heard of — reaches the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon. They get there by different routes, some of them long and roundabout. They get there together.
That is how we think about the people who use our tools. A play therapist working out of a converted spare room. A small group practice in a town most people could not find on a map. A clinician who left a larger system because the paperwork ate the part of the job they loved. None of that work is small because it started small.
It is not absorbed. It arrives.
The Kootenay goes hundreds of miles out of its way and joins the Columbia without giving up anything of itself. We build software on the same idea: tools that let independent practices do their work well, alongside everyone else doing it, without having to become something they are not.
Paradise Creek is where we started. Tributary feeds the record. Trailhead is where you begin. Basin holds what flows in — and everything in this part of the country drains to the Columbia Basin. Channel moves things where they need to go.