Old Portland's merchants once dominated inland Cascadia. The steel and asphalt channels that grew like symbiotic parasites off the path made by the river carry a lot more traffic now. Maybe someday the river will wash them away the same way it carved this Gorge. In some of the greatest floods known, which took place a mere 12,000 to 14,000 years or so ago, the massive Ice Age lake in the Northern Rockies repeatedly floated its ice dams and cut loose with enough water to drown land to the Pacific Coast under hundreds of feet of wet. Lake Missoula broke out around 40 times, transforming a narrow, V-shaped river valley through the Cascades into a wide gorge marked with sharp outcroppings of rock.
Magical waterfalls fly from ancient creekbeds shaved in midcourse by the floods.
Now modern humanity has created its own controlled flood behind the many huge hydroelectric dams in the Columbia's watershed. Some believe this has re-created the conditions for a new great inundation. Another ironic possibility opened by the white settlement of this land, by our Euro-American hubris. I check out an Oregon Trail commemoration at Crown Point's Vista House. Older folks in authentic pioneer garb toast marshmallows at a fire outside a pioneer tent.