Today was our day to traverse the famous and beautiful Columbia River Gorge. Waking early, we were on deck to witness our entrance at Cape Horn, a spectacular basaltic cliff on the Washington side. The river, along with the help of perhaps 100 ice age floods, has carved a magnificent valley through the Cascade Mountains. On the Oregon side, numerous side creeks were left perched high above the main river because of the relatively quick down-cutting by those ice age floods. One of these falls, Multnomah, would be visited later in the morning.
But first came massive Bonneville Dam and our first lock. Bonneville was the first of the ten proposed dams for the Columbia River back in 1932. This was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” plan for rescuing the United States from the grips of the Great Depression. Construction began in 1934 and was finished four years later. It then took two more years for the 47-mile-long reservoir to fill and for electrical energy to be generated.
We entered the Bonneville Lock, the gates closed behind us, and fairly quickly the chamber filled, and we were lifted 70 vertical feet to the first of the many reservoirs that we would traverse. Not far upstream from the lock and dam, our ship tied up at the old Cascades Lock, which was built in the late 1800s to allow boats to pass around treacherous rapids that existed prior to the construction of Bonneville Dam.
We boarded coaches and drove the short distance to Multnomah Falls, at 620 feet, the tallest in Oregon. From the coach, we got another view of the monolith Beacon Rock, a volcanic neck, which was the source of magma that once fed a long-eroded away volcano. At the falls, some guests headed up the steep trail toward their top, but most of us enjoyed the view from near their base.
Once back at the ship, we set sail for the mouth of the Hood River and the town of the same name. There we drove up the Hood River Valley, famous for its pears and apples, to visit Rasmussen Farm, where our hotel manager purchased fresh fruit for the ship. We then had the choice of either returning to the town of Hood River for a walk-around or a visit to one of the many wineries.
