Astoria-Megler Bridge view from Cape Disappointment
— the bridge that holds the river open.
Not only on a wall.
“From the headland above the lighthouse, the Columbia opens four miles wide. The Astoria-Megler Bridge runs across all of it: green steel truss on the Oregon side, long approach trestle stepping over the Washington tideflats. Cape Disappointment is where the Pacific and the Columbia meet, and where Lewis and Clark first saw the ocean in November 1805. From the cliff above Dead Man's Cove, container ships hold offshore for the bar pilot and small fishing boats slip under the bridge toward the fog. The bridge looks like one continuous line from this distance. It is not.
Astoria-Megler Bridge view from Cape Disappointment, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Astoria-Megler Bridge spans the mouth of the Columbia River for 4.1 miles between Astoria, Oregon and a point near Megler on the Washington shore. It opened on August 27, 1966 and is the longest continuous truss bridge in North America, carrying US Highway 101 across the river. The Cape Disappointment headland sits two miles west of the bridge's Washington terminus, inside Cape Disappointment State Park near Ilwaco in Pacific County. The cape was named by the British navigator John Meares in 1788 when he sailed past in heavy bar fog and concluded no major river was there. Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific shore at the cape in November 1805 at the close of their westward journey.
The Columbia River bar is one of the most dangerous ship-traffic chokepoints in the world. The river carries an average of about 265,000 cubic feet per second of freshwater into the Pacific, and the outflow meets ocean swell over a shoaling sand bar. The Columbia River Bar Pilots, founded in 1846, board every commercial vessel for the crossing. The U.S. Coast Guard's National Motor Lifeboat School operates from Cape Disappointment as the only school of its kind in the world, training surf-rescue crews in twenty-foot breaking seas. From the headland, container ships hold offshore until a pilot boat reaches them, then thread the channel under the bridge.
Cape Disappointment State Park covers 1,882 acres at the southwest tip of Washington's Long Beach Peninsula. The park is open year-round and a Washington Discover Pass is required to park (around ten dollars for a day or thirty dollars annual). Two working lighthouses sit on the headlands: Cape Disappointment Light, built in 1856, is Washington's oldest active lighthouse; North Head Light, built in 1898, sits two miles north on the open Pacific side. The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center stands on the cliff above Dead Man's Cove. Bridge-view turnouts are signed off WA-100, the loop road that runs from Ilwaco to the lighthouses.