I am the Columbia River.  I begin at Columbia Lake in southeast British Columbia, in Canada.  I am 1,243 miles long, and drop 2,690 feet before I empty into the Pacific Ocean at Astoria, Oregon.

By volume of water I'm the fourth largest river in the United States.  The average flow at my mouth is 265,000 cubic feet per second.  That would fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools, or cover six acres of land with one-foot of water, every second.  99,000 cubic feet of that comes from what I collect in Canada, and the rest from the Pacific Northwest.  I drain nearly the entire state of Idaho, much of Washington and Oregon, western Montana, and small parts of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada.  My watershed is the size of France.  My largest tributary is the Snake River.

There are over 400 dams in my watershed producing hydroelectricity.  14 of them are on my main stem, the first being built in 1938.  Together my dams produce 44% of the total U.S. hydroelectric generation.  That makes my watershed the leading producer of hydroelectric power in the world.

Back when I was a free-flowing river, 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead used to make their way upstream to spawn.  They went all the way to my headwaters in Canada, and all the way up the Snake River to Yellowstone.  They can't get past the Chief Joseph Dam in Washington now, so there are no salmon above that point.  The same is true on the Snake River above Hells Canyon Dam.

Celilo Falls used to be an important fishing and trading center for the Indians, but construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957 submerged the area.  Celilo was the oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent.

Besides providing hydroelectric power, my dams make possible flood control, irrigation, stream flow regulation, storage and delivery of water, and recreation.

My mouth was first sighted by Europeans in 1775.  Captain Gray was the first to cross my treacherous bar.  He did that in 1792.  He named me.  He named me after his ship.  Russia, Great Britain, Spain, and other countries tried to claim the area that I drain, but Captain Gray's visit in 1792, Lewis and Clark's float in dugout canoes from the area of the Tri-Cities, Washington in 1805, and the arrival of thousands of American settlers after 1842 secured most of the area for the United States.

My history is exciting.  The Columbia Bar is noteworthy.  It's a shifting sandbar out in the ocean that makes my mouth one of the most hazardous stretches of water to navigate in the world.  The Columbia Bar has the reputation of being "The Graveyard of Ships."

The Bridge of the Gods is another noteworthy part of my history.  It was a natural land bridge that I created near present-day Cascade, Oregon.  The bridge connected Oregon and Washington.  It probably collapsed in the Cascadia earthquake in the year 1700.  That earthquake was so big that it sent a tsunami clear across the Pacific Ocean to Japan.  The Japanese made a record of the event, otherwise we wouldn't know for sure when it happened.P

But the biggest events of all were the Missoula Floods that thundered down my gorge in ancient times.  There may have been 40 or even 80 of them.  They can't be counted.  They happened every time a glacier collapsed in western Montana.  The glacier made a dam that formed Lake Missoula.  Each time water broke through the glacier, the discharge from the lake exceeded the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.  Walls of water hundreds of feet high thundered across eastern Washington, removing all the topsoil.  The floods made the Snake River flow backwards, and filled the Willamette Valley with water.  The water was 400 feet deep where Portland sits today.

The farmers in the Willamette Valley of Oregon have me to thank for their fertile soils.  Their soils are the sediment that I brought from Washington during the Missoula Floods.