Klickitat River

About

Klickitat River, Washington — 1850s-1880s Pioneer Logging, 1986 Wild Klickitat, 31-mi Klickitat SP. The Klickitat's story starts in the rock. The canyon it now threads was shaped when basalt flows formed the base of the Columbia River Gorge roughly 1.8 million years ago, and the Klickitat State Park Trail that later followed the river still reveals stories of those massive volcanic flows along its meanders and those of its tributary, Swale Creek. Long before any survey crew mapped it, the river flowed through the ancestral territory of Indigenous peoples, serving as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. That presence endures at the gorge near river mile 2.5, where the Yakama Nation has fished with dip nets continuously for generations, a practice that predates settler arrival.

The settler economy arrived through timber. The Klickitat watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding the regional timber industry of the 1850s to 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s to 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910. The start of state forestry conservation in 1915 and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s together ended large-scale logging on the river.

The first close hydrological study of the Klickitat came in this same window. USGS survey work in the 1870s to 1890s, gauging-station establishment in the 1880s to 1910s, and state geological survey streamflow assessments in the 1910s to 1930s produced the first comprehensive picture of how the river behaved. Later, state water-pollution-control studies of the 1950s to 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000 turned attention to a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

Industry reached the canyon by rail in 1903, when the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad laid a branch line connecting Lyle and Goldendale. Those tracks carried freight until the line was abandoned in 1992 and reborn as the Klickitat Rails-to-Trail. That corridor now anchors the Klickitat State Park Trail, which runs 31 miles from a windswept plateau 1,600 feet above sea level down to the river's confluence with the Columbia, barely 100 feet above the sea.

The river's defining recognition came on November 17, 1986, when Congress designated its lowermost 10.8 miles as a National Wild and Scenic River, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The designation safeguarded the canyon's free-flowing waters and the fishery that still draws anglers and tribal fishers alike. In recent years the Washington Department of Natural Resources, working with local watershed partnerships, has taken on that inherited century of impacts: streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking from 2017 to 2024, a nutrient-reduction strategy from 2018 to 2024, and water-quality improvements from 2020 to 2024. Today the river still supports the Lyle, Klickitat, and Glenwood economies, and its five paddling sections carry boaters from the Yakama Reservation to Leidle Ramp, on through Mineral Springs, Wheeler Creek, and Turkey Hole, and finally down to Lyle.