Clackamas River

About

Clackamas River — Portland's Mountain Water Supply. The USGS gauge 14211000 registers an average of about 2,400 cubic feet per second on the Clackamas, with a historical flow near 2,100 CFS and a paddling window that runs from roughly 800 to 4,000. That range holds a river of many characters. The upper reaches form a remote forest canyon rated Class III–IV; below Three Lynx the run eases to Class II–III intermediate water; the Estacada-to-Barton stretch settles into Class II and delivers Bob's Hole, a surf wave near Estacada that has become one of the most famous river-surfing features in North America; and the final Barton-to-Clackamas float drops to a Class I family run.

The watershed's human history runs deep. For thousands of years before contact, the Clackamas band of Chinook people inhabited the lower river and the Willamette Valley, and the river takes its name from them. Its salmon runs were among the most productive in the Willamette Basin. Disease and displacement decimated the Clackamas people through the 1800s, even as the river became a workhorse of the new settler economy.

Crossing it was once a gamble. After floods swept away the ferry in 1882, Mr. Paquet of Oregon City built the river's first bridge — a wooden covered span — in 1883. By then the Clackamas was a major tributary to the 19th-century Willamette Valley farming economy, with sawmills at Oregon City processing Clackamas River logs through the 1850s to the 1890s. The wider watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s to feed the regional timber industry and railroad expansion, until the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1930s establishment of state forests ended large-scale cutting.

The river's modern shape was set by power. Between 1937 and 1941, Portland General Electric built three hydropower dams — Faraday, North Fork and River Mill — on the lower Clackamas, turning the river into a major power source. The watershed is also part of Portland's Bull Run system, which has supplied drinking water to the city since 1895. Even so, the Clackamas kept its wild upper stretch intact. On October 28, 1988, the wild upper 23 miles were added to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System under Public Law 100-557, a designation that protects the river's native winter steelhead and Chinook salmon habitat from new dams and diversions.

Today the Clackamas does quieter, essential work. Its gravel beds and cold currents still hold naturally spawning steelhead, chinook and coho salmon, along with lamprey eel and sea-run cutthroat trout. It runs through Mt. Hood National Forest and carries an Oregon Scenic Waterway designation. Outfitters such as eNRG Kayaking teach and guide on it, playboaters chase Bob's Hole at the right flows, and families float the lower Class I water — all on a river that supplies drinking water to more than 300,000 people while keeping the runs that the Clackamas Chinook depended on. It remains, in the truest sense, both wild and working for the metropolitan edge it borders.