Astoria Column

Roadside Americana

The longest continuous truss bridge in North America -- 4.1 miles of steel cantilever arcing across the mouth of the Columbia to Washington state, opened in 1966 after decades of ferry-only crossing.

Outdoors

Captain James Cook named this 500-foot basalt bluff in 1778 after the brutal weather that greeted his first sighting of the Pacific Northwest coast -- it's still the same brutal, beautiful lookout today, with US-101 climbing to its fourth-highest elevation point in the state right past the viewpoint's edge.

Outdoors

A 2.5-mile trail runs the spine of a knife-thin headland jutting 1.5 miles straight out into the Pacific, ending at a cliff-edge viewpoint with a WWII memorial plaque for a B-17 crew that crashed here in 1943 -- on a clear winter day you can watch migrating gray whales pass below.

History

The shortest lighthouse in Oregon (38 feet) once flashed a beam visible 21 miles out to sea from a first-order Fresnel lens built in Paris -- a short walk away stands the Octopus Tree, a 250-300-year-old Sitka spruce with no central trunk, its limbs splayed out like tentacles for reasons still debated (candidate storm damage vs. deliberate Native shaping).

Nature

A UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve where a rare native prairie clings to a headland between the forest and the sea -- one of the last strongholds of the endangered Oregon silverspot butterfly, and one of the few places on the entire coast where a hiking trail climbs through old growth straight to an open, grassy, ocean-facing summit.

History

Oregon's official state maritime museum sits on the Columbia's 'Graveyard of the Pacific' -- 2,000+ shipwrecks logged at this river mouth -- with a real Coast Guard lifeboat, a WWII destroyer's bridge, and a Japanese boat carried across the Pacific by the 2011 tsunami.