Another way of looking at stream valleys is by their shape. At their headwaters, the valleys of Bryant tributaries are V-shaped. The streams cut right down into the soil and rock because they are flowing steeply downward, and so they flow fast. Fast water carries more sediment, which grinds the stream deeper and deeper into the bottom of the V. A V-shaped valley is a younger valley, because it is cutting back into the higher ground where it begins. ("Younger" means hundreds and thousands of years. "Older" means hundreds of thousands, even millions of years!) 

The Bryant's valley is older where it has already cut pretty far down through the bedrock. There it flows less steeply on its way to join the North Fork. Where it's older, it's broader, and you find the rich, flat bottomlands good for farming. There the stream "meanders," year by year slowly moving back and forth across the valley, one side losing, one side gaining land. There the land floods in high water times. That's why the bottoms are also called "flood plains". 

You may notice that it is the outside of a curve that eats into the stream bank. The water flows fastest on the outside of the curve. On the inside curve, the slower water drops its sediment, and the land builds up on that bank. That's where you find gravel bars. Then sycamores sprout. In a few years what was stream bottom has become bottomland!