Crossing the Columbia River bar at Astoria

The Columbia River reaches the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon, where its last miles run past low sand spits before the water opens into the sea. The passage is not smooth. A bank of sand lies across the river mouth, and on it the river's outflow meets the Pacific swell. The breakers that build there are visible from the Astoria waterfront, and they mark the bar — the stretch of water that has made the entrance to the Columbia one of the hardest on the American coast.

The bar

Rivers carry sediment, and the Columbia moves a heavy load of sand and silt. At the mouth, the current slows and drops its load, while the sea pushes some of it back. The result is a shifting field of shoals across the entrance. Waves approaching the mouth feel the shoals first: they slow, grow steeper, and break even where the water beneath them is deep enough for an oceangoing ship. The river's own outflow runs against the incoming swell, and on an ebb tide the two currents meet head-on. The bar can produce breaking seas in conditions that would be routine elsewhere on the Pacific coast.

The Columbia is one of the largest rivers in the United States by volume. Its high water comes in late spring and early summer, when snowmelt from the Cascades and the Rockies pushes down the river; the winter danger is different, when Pacific storms drive heavy swell onto the coast and the river runs full with rain. The National Weather Service publishes bar conditions in its marine forecasts, and the Coast Guard can close the bar to small craft when seas are too large. On a strong ebb against a heavy swell, the bar is testing for vessels of any size.

Until the late nineteenth century, the bar was also shallower than it is now. The Army Corps of Engineers built long jetties from Cape Disappointment on the Washington side and from Clatsop Spit on the Oregon side, narrowing the river mouth and forcing the current into a straighter channel that scours its own depth. The channel is dredged today to about 43 feet from the bar upriver to Portland. The jetties did not tame the bar; they gave the river a defined way across it, and the river keeps moving the bottom despite the work.

The crossing

Every oceangoing ship bound for Portland and the other upriver ports must cross the bar twice, in and out, and neither passage is made on its own. Columbia River bar pilots, a group of master mariners who work the river mouth, board vessels before they arrive. The pilot reaches the ship by launch from the pilot boat, or by helicopter when the sea is too rough to lie alongside. Once aboard, the pilot directs the crossing and the run upriver.

Crossings are timed. Ships wait at anchor in the lower river, sometimes for days, for a window when the ebb is slack and the swell is down. Tugboats stand by near the mouth, and the Coast Guard keeps rescue stations on both sides of the river. Even so, the margin is small. A loaded ship that loses power or steering on the bar covers little distance before the sea does the steering instead. The bar's history is full of vessels that came to rest on the sand within sight of the lighthouses at Cape Disappointment.

Astoria and the river mouth

Astoria exists because of the bar. The town lies on the south shore of the river, on the slope of the last hill before the sea, and its waterfront has served the river's traffic since the early nineteenth century. John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company built a trading post there in 1811, making it the oldest permanent American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. Lewis and Clark had spent the winter of 1805–06 at Fort Clatsop, a few miles to the south, before there was any town. The fur post became a river town, and the river town became a fishing port; by the late 1800s, salmon canneries lined the waterfront.

The river mouth has collected wrecks the way it collects sand. The coast from Cape Disappointment to Tillamook Head has long been called the Graveyard of the Pacific, and the bar is the center of that reputation. Hundreds of vessels have been lost at the river's mouth since captains first began trying to cross it. The clearest reminder is the Peter Iredale, a British four-masted steel barque that ran ashore on Clatsop Spit in October 1906. Her rusting ribs still stand in the sand at Fort Stevens State Park, open to the weather and to visitors.

Maritime Astoria keeps working around those remains. The Columbia River Maritime Museum stands on the Astoria waterfront, with the lightship Columbia moored alongside it. The Coast Guard maintains stations at the river's mouth on both shores. The commercial fishing fleet ties up at the foot of town. Grain ships and other oceangoing traffic ride at anchor in the lower river, waiting for their turn at the bar, while the Astoria-Megler Bridge carries US 101 overhead on a span more than four miles long.

The bar is not a fixed place but the meeting of river, sand, and sea, and it changes with every season and every big storm. What stays constant is the line it draws at the river's mouth: no ship reaches Portland without crossing the Columbia River bar.