Our 33 Day, 6731 Mile Road Trip–part 5

As I mentioned  near the end of part 4, when we left the Pilot Travel Center at Biggs, Oregon on Friday morning, April 27, our 6th day on the road, we drove across the bridge into Washington state.  The bridge, by the way, is called by several names.  The official name seems to be The Sam Hill Memorial bridge.  It is also known as the Biggs Rapids-Sam Hill Bridge.  Samuel Hill was a business man and entrepreneur, the bridge was his dream.  He had run a ferry at that location for several years, beginning in 1925.  It was one of many that ran at that location from 1868 until the opening of the new bridge.

Crossing back across the bridge into Oregon we got back on I-84.  A few miles further west we pulled into Memaloose Rest Stop.  In the middle of the Columbia River is Memaloose Island, or island of the dead.  When Lewis and Clark visited the area in 1805 they called it Sepulchar Island.  Here is a quote from their journal.  

"... passed three large rocks in The river the middle rock is large long and has Several Squar vaults on it. we call this rockey Island the Sepulchar ..." [Clark, October 29, 1805]   Below is a photo taken from the rest stop.



A few miles on West we came to the area of magnificent waterfalls, perhaps the one best known is Multnomah Falls.  We stopped to see it first before getting onto the old historic highway so that we could view several of the others.  Here are a few pictures.

This is Multnomah Falls.  The upper and lower falls together are 620 feet high.  The bridge you see in the photo is 45 feet long and is 105 feet above the lower falls.  We hiked up to the bridge and Connie walked across.  I preferred to stay on firm ground.  I did take her picture!  There is a trail that one can take to hike to the top of the falls but when we were there it was closed due to a landslide.







The falls pictured here is called Horsetail Falls.  It is named that apparently because it looks a lot like a horses tail!  It is 192 feet tall.














This is Bridal Veil Falls.  We had to hike about 2/3 of a mile roundtrip to visit this beautiful falls.  As can be seen, there are two “drops” to this falls and it is 118 feet total in height.













Here are two additional waterfalls that we visited, and we didn’t see them all by any means.  The one on the left is Wahkenna Falls and the one on the right is Laturell Falls.















Here is one more photo of the Columbia River taken from the Crown Point Overlook at Vista House.

Vista House was first proposed by Samuel Lancaster, an engineer for Multnomah County who supervised the Columbia River Highway Project.  Vista House was designed to be an observatory and a rest stop.  Construction began late 1916.  Here is a picture of Vista House.

It is hard to tell but that is Connie in front of Vista House.  Other than a brief stop for some lunch this was our last stop before arriving at our son’s home about 2:45 P.M.  In the next installment we’ll show you some of the places we visited during our visit.