Columbia River — Hanford Reach

About

Columbia River — May 11, 1792, Robert Gray's Discovery. The story of the Reach begins with the people who lived on it. The Wanapum maintained year-round villages along the river, and the reach's gravel bars supported the largest fall Chinook salmon spawning in the Columbia Basin. It was, in every practical sense, the salmon heart of the river. That world was interrupted in 1943, when the federal government established the Hanford Site to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project, claiming some 586 square miles along the Reach's eastern shore. Forced removal during the project displaced the Wanapum in the 1940s.

The river's recorded modern history runs deeper still. On May 11, 1792, Captain Robert Gray's ship Columbia Rediviva crossed the river's bar and sailed twelve miles upstream to what is now the site of Tongue Point — the first American entry into the river, which Gray named for his ship. Lewis and Clark first explored it upriver in 1805, following it toward its headwaters. The Columbia became the historic border between Oregon and Washington and the principal salmon river of the Pacific Northwest, supporting all five species of Pacific salmon and steelhead.

The watershed carried an industrial century as well. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the surrounding country was logged to support the regional timber industry and railroad expansion, worked by local sawmills and logging drives until the old-growth stands were exhausted and state forestry conservation took hold. Beginning in the 1870s, USGS surveys and gauging stations produced the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the corridor, work that later folded into Clean Water Act assessments and modern restoration programs.

Against that backdrop, the Hanford Site's fifty-year nuclear exclusion zone did something no conservation law had managed: it shielded the river. While dams reshaped salmon runs elsewhere — even as they supplied fifty percent of the region's electricity — the closed corridor stayed undammed and largely undeveloped. Today the Reach is among the most vital salmon habitats on the continent, where approximately eighty percent of the Columbia's fall chinook return to spawn, with spawning counts exceeding 80,000 fish in peak years. It holds the last significant wild fall Chinook run on the river.

On June 8, 2000, President Clinton recognized that legacy by establishing the Hanford Reach National Monument, protecting the last free-flowing reach of the Upper Columbia. The corridor is also carried as a National Wild & Scenic Study River. Paddlers read it in three sections: Priest Rapids Dam to Vernita Bridge, twenty miles of Class I–II big water; Vernita Bridge to White Bluffs, the fifteen-mile signature stretch where the White Bluffs stand visible above the water; and White Bluffs to Richland, sixteen wider, slower miles to the lower reach. Flows on gauge 12472800 average around 120,000 cubic feet per second, with an optimal window of 80,000 to 200,000 cfs — the scale of a river that, for once, still runs free.