Columbia River Gorge

The Columbia River Gorge is the great water-level passage through the Cascade Range, a corridor that has funneled people, trade and weather across the Northwest for thousands of years. The canyon runs about 80 miles (130 km) between Oregon and Washington and reaches up to 4,000 feet (1,200 m) deep. Its sheer basalt walls owe much to the Missoula Floods, ice-age torrents that repeatedly roared down the Columbia and scoured the gorge as high as Crown Point. Dozens of waterfalls, including Multnomah Falls, now pour off the Oregon side.

The gorge was a crossroads long before Lewis and Clark floated it in 1805, with Native fishing and trading centers at Celilo Falls, drowned by The Dalles Dam in 1957. Bonneville Dam and the Historic Columbia River Highway followed in the 20th century. In 1986 Congress made it the second National Scenic Area in the country, managed jointly by the Forest Service and a bistate commission. The gorge's funnel winds draw windsurfers and kiteboarders, and its slopes are still recovering from the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire, which burned nearly 50,000 acres.

• The Columbia River
  The great river of the Pacific Northwest carved by
• Multnomah Falls
  Oregon’s tallest waterfall, a two-tier plunge in the Columbia River Gorge contains
• The Cascade Range
  A chain of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest cuts through
• Oregon
  The Beaver State, from rainforest coast to high desert located in
• Washington
  The Evergreen State, the wet and dry sides of the Cascades located in
• Historic Columbia River Highway
  The waterfall drive through the Gorge related