Cascade Locks

Cascade Locks and Bridge of the Gods

In the final chapter of her bestselling book, Wild, author Cheryl Strayed ponders her experiences on the Pacific Crest Trail while enjoying a soft serve cone at the Eastwind Drive-In at Cascade Locks, Ore. Located 40 miles east of Portland off Interstate 84, it’s the only town on the trail’s 2600-mile journey from the Mexican border to Canada, and the spot where the trail crosses the mighty Columbia River via the Bridge of the Gods.

The town, one of the oldest in Oregon, has long been a place where travelers needed to come to terms with their plans. An ancient landslide created a series of whitewater rapids and cascades that served as a major barrier in the river, forcing a long portage around them.  Lewis and Clark described the cascades as “…water passing with great velocity forming and boiling in a horrible manner…”,  and pioneers on the Oregon Trail had to choose between the hard trek over the Barlow Road, or facing the rapids in a make-shift raft with the possibility of losing everything.

 

In 1856, a portage road was built and mules carried freight around the cascades until they were replaced with the Oregon Pony, the first steam locomotive to operate west of the Mississippi. The Pony, described as an “ungainly contraption,” with its tiny engine carried around 200 tons of freight each day. Passengers rode in one small coach or aboard the flatcars.

Historical Museum

The era of portage railroad ended in 1897 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a series of locks to move river traffic around the cascades. Later, when the Bonneville Dam and Locks were completed during the New Deal, the waters flooded the old locks leaving only skeletal stone and concrete outlines, and stairs leading to nowhere.  What remains is now a National Historic Site and can be viewed at the town’s Marina Park, owned and operated by the Port of Cascade Locks. This attractive, riverside swatch of parkland is also home to the Oregon Pony which currently resides in its own glass-enclosed and climate-controlled structure.  Next to it, occupying the former lock tender’s house, is the Cascade Locks Historical Museum with three floors of artifacts and mementos from the region’s past.  

At the east end of the park are statues of Lewis and Clark guide, Sacagawea, and their canine traveling companion, Seaman. Next door at the Locks Waterfront Café is the docking site of the Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler, a three-story replica of the ships that cruised the Gorge in the 1800s. Built in 1983 in Hood River, this 499-passenger paddle

Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler

wheeler offers narrated excursions, brunch and dinner cruises on the river between May and October.

A few miles downstream is an attraction well worth a short detour off Interstate 84.  While a working fish hatchery might not be on anyone’s top ten sightseeing list, the Bonneville Hatchery is located in a pretty, creek side setting with stone ponds, flowers, tall trees, and neatly manicured grounds, and receives over a million visitors annually.  The hatchery, opened in 1909, raises fall Chinook salmon, Coho salmon, and summer and winter steelhead. A self-guided tour leads visitors through the process. In the historic, wooden Egg Incubation Building, a small museum covers everything anyone would want to know about salmon and their fascinating life cycle. However, the biggest and best known attraction at the hatchery is Herman, a 70-year-old, 450 pounds, ten foot

Egg Incubation Building and Museum

long sturgeon. He and his buddies can be observed through an underwater, glass window. The adjacent Bonneville Dam and Locks also welcomes visitors.

Cascade Locks is the nearest town to a number of popular Columbia Gorge hiking trails.  In addition to the Pacific Coast Trail, there is access nearby to the Eagle Creek and Wahclella Falls trails offering some of the Gorge’s most spectacular scenery and waterfalls. This spring, a new mountain bike trail opened on the east side of town.

Herman

 

Ghost Canneries of the Lower Columbia River

 

 It was much more than our childhood memories of those unsavory, school-lunch salmon patties served with creamed peas that brought down the salmon cannery business along the lower Columbia.  A combination of overfishing, degradation of spawning habitat upstream, and the construction of dams on the Columbia and its tributaries combined to destroy what had been in early history, salmon runs estimated as large as 16 million annually.

For centuries, natives fished the river, preserving the salmon through smoking or drying processes. Early Europeans tried salting and packing salmon in barrels which were shipped to Hawaii and the East Coast with mixed results. However, improvements in canning methods meant the fish could be packed safely and travel all over the world.  The Hume brothers opened the first salmon cannery in 1866 in Eagle Cliff, Washington, a few miles upstream from present day Cathlamet. Their success spawned the development of more canneries along the lower Columbia River, and by the heyday of the late 1880s, there were 38 canneries in the area, packing as much as 30 million, one-pound cans a year. That’s a lot of potential salmon patties.

Pier 39, Astoria

The canneries brought jobs to the area along with a rich mix of ethnic groups whose cultures and influence have remained.  In the early days, much of the dirty work of butchering salmon was done by Chinese men supplied by labor contractors out of San Francisco.  With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, canneries turned to Filipinos and Japanese workers, while at the same time immigrants from Scandinavia, Finland, Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean arrived to fish and labor in the canneries.

Inside the Bumble Bee Museum

Astoria, Oregon, was the center of the canning business and carried the moniker, Cannery Capital of the World. Once home to 22 canneries, it’s a good place to begin a tour of what remains of this important industry.  Nearly all the wooden cannery buildings have succumbed to old age and blustery winter storms, but a few remain in Astoria. At the end of 39^th St. on the eastern end of town is Pier 39, the old Hanthorn/Bumble Bee Cannery.  It was the last operating cannery in the area, closing in 1980. Today it houses a coffee shop, pub, and the free Bumble Bee museum. Inside are wooden gill-netter boats, old cannery processing equipment, and photos of the days when Bumble Bee was Astoria’s largest employer.

Big Red, Astoria

Nearby, at the end of 31^st St., is a large, hulking, red building sitting out in the river and looking a bit tattered. Known as Big Red, it served as a satellite station for Union Fishermen’s Coop where fishermen could drop off their catch and spread their nets to dry. Over 100 years old, the wooden structure lost its top story in a wind storm in 2007, but efforts are underway to save this piece of history.

Cross the Astoria-Megler Bridge to the Washington side of the river and follow Hwy 401 east to Knappton Cove. Rotting wooden posts extending out into the water are all that remain of the Eureka and Epicure Packing Co. In 1899, the federal government built a quarantine station on the site of the abandoned cannery. Ships arriving in Astoria were inspected for any signs of contagious diseases. If infected, they were directed across the river to the quarantine station, or pest house.  Ships were fumigated with burning sulfur and passengers treated for disease. Today the building houses a museum open on Saturdays during summer months.

Knappton Cove Quarantine Station

Altoona, Washington

A bit further east, a winding road leads south from Rosburg to the ghost town of Altoona. A few houses and wooden pilings in the river are all that remain of a town that was once a major port for steamers traveling between Portland and Astoria. This stretch of the river had six canneries in the early 1900s, but today it is a quiet spot in a beautiful setting.  Large rock pillars topped with hemlocks sit in the harbor, and the end-of-the-road atmosphere makes it well worth the 13-mile, round-trip detour.

In the town of Cathlamet along the riverfront, a little upstream from the boarded-up Water Rat Tap Tavern, is what remains of the Warren Cannery. Two years ago, a large part of the building collapsed and today what little remains is being salvaged. Once gone, it will join its fellow ghost canneries along the lower Columbia.

Remnants of the Warren Cannery, Cathlamet

Haunted House on the Columbia

When caretakers of the Caples House in Columbia City began noticing a ghostly female figure standing by the wood stove in the kitchen, an upstairs light bulb turning on and off, and indentations on the feather bed indicting two people sitting on the edge of the bed, they decided the time had come to contact professional ghost hunters. The team found a strange energy anomaly in parts of the house and subsequent photographs showed a shadowy vapor in the room and the face of an elderly woman visible in the mirror. A later investigation using digital recorders picked up numerous ghost voices in the house including that of an older woman.

Apparently it’s a friendly ghost, and no one should be deterred from visiting the Caples House in this month of Halloween and ghostly happenings. The property, located on the Columbia River about 30 miles northwest of Portland, is operated as a museum by the Daughters of the American Revolution. On a docent-led tour, visitors can learn the story of Dr. Charles Caples, whose family occupied the house for almost 100 years. As a young lad, Caples came to Oregon in 1844 by way of the Oregon Trail and settled with his family on a claim of 320 acres along the Columbia River. The lure of California gold drew him south in 1848, but he returned to Oregon and used his earnings to attend Tualatin Academy, now Pacific University in Forest Grove. After graduation, he filed for a land claim near his father’s and, in 1855, married Lucinda McBride of Yamhill County. Continuing his education in the field of medicine, Caples became the first doctor in the area. In 1870, he constructed the two-story, frame house that sits on the property today.

His middle daughter, Dell Caples Houghton, lived in the house until 1959, forgoing electricity and cooking on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. An active member of the local Daughters of the American Revolution, she presented the property to them upon her death. Fortunately, the house was altered very little over the years and, after some restoration, was opened to the public as a museum in 1970.

The Caples House Museum consists of five buildings and occupies an entire city block overlooking the Columbia River and Mt. St. Helens. The house itself includes a small kitchen and pantry, doctor’s office, parlor on the first floor and three bedrooms on the second floor. It is decorated with period pieces some original to the Caples’ family such as the square-cut Curtiss piano that traveled to Oregon via Cape Horn. Also on display are collections of local Native American artifacts and early, scary medical and dental equipment used by the doctor.

Behind the house, a Tool Shed features a variety of old tools and farm equipment, and the Carriage House has been converted to a doll and toy museum. Of special interest is a collection of First Lady dolls wearing their inaugural gowns. A Country Store sells hand-crafted items, Oregon history memorabilia, and assorted collectibles and antiques; and a new Social Center serves as a venue for receptions, meetings, and weddings. In the back of the property is a 130 year-old apple and pear orchard that recently received official recognition from the Oregon Heritage Tree Program. The house and its outbuildings are open weekends and holidays between March and October from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. The price of admission is $3.00.