Iris Sanderson Jones

PUBLISHED IN: Travel Columnist, Bellingham Herald; Contributor, Home & Away; Whatcom Magazine, and other newspapers and magazines.

SPECIALTIES: Canada and Northwest

BOOKS: 3rd edition editor, Quick Escapes in the Pacific Northwest (Globe Pequot) 1997; Country-Roads of Ontario, Country Roads Press (US) and Nimbus (Canada); Economist Business Travelers Guide (London).

AWARDS: Society of American Travel Writers, Western States, 1998; Central States, 1980-1994, incl. Henry Bradshaw Award; Midwest Travel Writers Mark Twain and Best of Show Awards, 1978-1993; Michigan Travel Industry Honor Roll, 1986.

(360) 733-0954 (Phone/Fax)
2602 Likely Court
Bellingham, WA 98229
» irisSjones@aol.com

VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY TO ASTORIA ‘OCEAN IN VIEW”

by Iris Sanderson Jones

Three more steps to the top of the 125-foot Astoria Column. It is a tough climb but worth it when you mount the 164th step to the viewing platform  that rises on Coxcomb Hill above the maritime town of Astoria, Oregon.  Locals drive up the hill to watch the sun set in molten gold over the place where the Columbia River meets the treacherous seas and shifting sand bars of the Pacific Ocean.

The setting sun gilds the town, the small river running past Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark over-wintered  in 1805-6, and the 3.2 mile bridge that crosses the Columbia to sites where the explorers beached their dugout canoes on the Washington shore. 

As America launches the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, you can map your own voyage of discovery through the new  Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, which links a 40-mile chain of state and federal sites north and south of Astoria.  This is where a member of the Corps of Discovery shouted “ocian in view” and the explorers discovered that they could not cross that turbulent river mouth in their dugout canoes.

America’s most highly-rated bar pilots lead giant freighters through the river mouth now, but it is easy to imagine a frustrated Captain George Vancouver sailing his British caravel H.M.S. Discovery up and down the coast in search of the river mouth and a triumphant Captain Robert Gray sailing his American ship Columbia Rediviva across the bar in 1792.  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ended their Voyage of Discovery here, fulfilling Thomas Jefferson’s dream of Manifest Destiny and claiming the west for America.

Columbia River Maritime Museum

The story is colorfully told at the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which stands at 16th Street and historic Highway 30 when you drive west into Astoria. The bright red Lightship Columbia is docked outside, ready for touring, but what lures you into the museum is a 44-foot Coast Guard boat rearing high on a wave in the museum window. The most highly-trained Coast Guard coxwains in America rescue 600 seamen a year from the rivermouth, where 150 billion gallons of river water empty into the Pacific every day. A map pinpoints the hundreds of shipwrecks that litter the sea bed around the river mouth.

A quick museum tour makes the river story real. A wooden map traces the river’s 1200-mile journey south and west from the Canadian Rockies.  Sea otter skins show what attracted John Jacob Astor, who gave his name to the fur trading post and the town of Astoria.   A model of the four-masted British barque, Peter Iredale, prepares you for the sight of its rusting skeleton, which still protrudes from the sand beach near Clatsop Spit.

Astoria

A 20-block circle tour introduces you to the town, population 10,000.  Journey one block up 16th Street to Heritage House, built into the old city hall at 1618 Exchange Street, and one block west on Exchange to a tiny park that holds a remnant of the 1811 Fort Astoria. Follow two streets of  Victorian houses, built by magnates enriched by fish canneries and logging, to the tourable Flavel House at 8th and Exchange. This 1855 Queen Anne style mansion was built by Captain George Flavel, the river’s first licensed bar pilot and a successful 19th century entrepreneur.

Continue four blocks down 8th  Street to a viewing platform overlooking the river. Ride the Riverfront  Trolley, in season, or follow the trolley tracks back to the Columbia River Maritime Museum, with a stop at  14th Street Riverpark to hear today’s bar pilots chatter over loudspeakers. Pilots still do the most difficult job on the river: climbing aboard ships in turbulent ocean seas and piloting them through a narrow shipping channel at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Downtown Astoria is eight blocks long and four blocks wide, with Commercial Street as its main drag.  The town was sagging gently with age until the renovation of the Liberty Theatre, on the corner of 12th and Commercial, sparked a renaissance that is gentrifying the entire area. Property developer Chester Trabucco converted an old hotel into the now-luxurious small Hotel Elliot across 12th St.  Add spas, new restaurants and Victorian  bed-and-breakfast establishments, and you have a blossoming town.  The town hopes to flourish as the gateway to  the new Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, signed into law in October 2004.

National Lewis and Clark Historical Park

The park combines twelve national and state park areas along 40 miles of Pacific coast in Washington and Oregon, creating a chain of sites that tell the overall story of the final leg of the Voyage of Discovery at the mouth of the Columbia River.
This is the only national park dedicated entirely to Lewis and Clark.

The park, which is still a work in progress, includes the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and sites where the Voyage of Discovery landed on the Washington shore of the Columbia, and an expanded Fort Clatsop National Memorial, where the expedition spent the very wet winter of 1805-6 on the Oregon side.

Astoria, founded five years after Lewis and Clark launched their canoes for home, is a good headquarters location for a tour during the Lewis & Clark bicentennial. Drive up Coxcomb Hill at sundown to see the story of exploration and settlement painted in gold on the surface of the Astoria Column.  You can’t quite see Fort Clatsop from there, but you can watch the Great River of the West pounding through the river mouth  to the sea and the great sand beaches that line the coast in both directions.
BOX: Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce (800) 875-6807 or www.oldoregon.com
          
Lewis & Clark National Historical Park

Chip Jenkins, Superintendent of the new Lewis & Clark National Historical Park says that “the long-range goal is to create a park system that ties together nationally-significant sites into a cooperative management system.  It will take years to hammer out all the aspects so that we have unified highway signs, internet sites, ranger programs and fee structures.”

For the moment, National Park passes will be valid at NPS sites but state fees still apply at state sites. Lewis and Clark Explorer Bus runs daily from Astoria and other area sites to Fort Clatsop. Your admission to Fort Clatsop serves as a three-day pass on the bus.

Start your tour with information from one of the two signature sites.

In Oregon: Fort Clatsop (503- 861-2471 or www.nps.gov/lewi),  where  Lewis and Clark over wintered 1805-6. This is area headquarters for the National Park Service, which includes  Fort Clatsup, Netul Landing, the  Fort to Sea Trail under construction between Fort Clatsop and the sand dune beaches of Sunset Beach State Recreation Area, the Salt Works built by Lewis and Clark on the beach near the town of Seaside. NPS rangers will point you to Oregon state sites such as Fort Stevens State Park, site of a Clatsop tribal village where the Corps traded with local Native Americans, and Ecola State Park, where William Clark and Shoshone guide Sacagawea found a whale skeleton near Tillamook Head.

In Washington: Lewis& Clark Interpretive Center (360-642-3029 or www.parks.wa.gov)  a state site built high above the boiling waters where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean, with access to lighthouses and Cape Disappointment State park. State interpreters will point you to in-progress NPS roadside sites at Dismal Nitch, where the Corps of Discovery first landed and Station Camp, headquarters for area exploration before the Corps moved to the south side of the river.

Destination:The Pacific, November 11-15, 2005,  will be the new  national  park’s signature bicentennial event, one of only 15 such events recognized by the National Council for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.  (503- 861-4403 or www.destinationthepacific.com)