Cascade Head (lower/Knight Park trailhead)

History

A 125-foot column atop 600-foot Coxcomb Hill, wrapped in a 525-foot hand-sgraffito mural of Oregon's founding story, with a 164-step spiral staircase to an observation deck looking out over the mouth of the Columbia River -- the same view that made this hill the natural place to put it in 1926.

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).

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.