Location, location, location.
Living in Clark County means having access to a world-renowned playground that’s an easy day’s drive from home.
The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, established by Congress in 1986, offers a dizzying array of recreation opportunities, from windsurfing and sailboarding to rugged hiking and mountain biking to museum and winery tours and strolls through picturesque towns, with an infinite number of photo ops along the away.
It’s an open-air natural history classroom, with rare wildflowers and dramatic geological formations. Deep within Bonneville Dam, west of Cascade Locks, Ore., visitors can witness the annual migration of salmon and steelhead through a special viewing window as biologists conduct fish counts to determine the size of the runs.
The Columbia River offers a chance to fish for giant sturgeon and spring and fall chinook salmon. The Little White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia on the Washington side, beckons advanced kayakers with legendary white-water rapids and falls.
The scenic area spans parts of two states and six counties and extends 80 miles from the wet green forests west of the Cascade Crest to the arid, open grasslands on the east side.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled this way in 1804 and returned in 1806. History buffs can read the expedition journals and imagine what the Gorge was like before the river was dammed, the marshes drained and developed, the forests logged.
To protect scenic vistas, rural development in the Gorge is restricted by the National Scenic Area Act; most economic development is limited to the scenic area’s 13 cities and towns.
The Oregon side of the Gorge, which is mostly publicly owned, is laced with waterfalls that cascade from the rim, including Multnomah Falls, at 620 feet the second-highest year-round waterfall in the United States. The Washington side features stark escarpments carved by ancient ice age floods.
The Gorge itself is a major tourist attraction, with panoramic views from Cape Horn east of Washougal and Crown Point east of Corbett on the Oregon side.
Hiking trails abound, from the easy walk that leads to lower Multnomah Falls to the steep path that ascends Dog Mountain. One of the Gorge’s most popular routes for hikers and cyclists is Oregon’s Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail. It follows the route of the original U.S. Highway 30, the first highway through the Gorge. The trail is open between Hood River and Mosier and between Cascade Locks and Bonneville Dam.
Guided walks at Columbia Hills State Park east of Dallesport allow visitors to view prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs carved by Columbia Basin tribes, including the famous specimen of Indian rock art known as “She Who Watches.”
Nearby, the Dalles Mountain Ranch, now part of the same state park, preserves a sprawling working ranch that presents panoramic vistas to the south and east.
Artifacts both prehistoric and post-settlement are on display at the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center in Stevenson and the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, Ore.
About 100 miles east of Vancouver, the Maryhill Museum of Art, housed in a castlelike chateau overlooking the Columbia River, offers an eclectic collection, including Rodin sculptures, American Indian baskets and beadwork and memorabilia from Queen Marie of Romania. The museum and the nearby Stonehenge replica are the legacy of Samuel Hill, the legendary entrepreneur who promoted road-building projects throughout the Northwest.
In recent years, the Gorge has become a magnet for more gentrified forms of recreation. Wind surfers from around the world converge on hip Hood River to enjoy its world-class gusts. City-dwellers can take self-guided tours of wineries and vineyards in Klickitat County. Chic hotels and bed-and-breakfast establishments offer scenic backdrops for weddings and other special events, complete with fine dining.
And golfers enjoy the 18-hole golf course tucked into 175 wooded acres at upscale Skamania Lodge, a contemporary hotel and convention center in Stevenson.
