Willamette River
— — a river that gathers a whole valley before it turns.
Not only on a wall.
“The Willamette gathers western Oregon between two mountain ranges and runs north 187 miles, from its forks south of Eugene through Salem and into the Columbia at Portland. Cottonwoods and big-leaf maples line the banks. The river slides past farms, basalt bluffs, and the long working harbour at Portland's centre. Steelhead still run it. The valley was named for it long before the city was.
Willamette River, 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 Willamette River runs roughly 187 miles north through western Oregon, from the confluence of its Middle and Coast forks south of Eugene to its mouth on the Columbia River at Portland. It drains the Willamette Valley between the Cascade and Coast ranges, an 11,500-square-mile basin that holds about two-thirds of the state's population. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operates thirteen dams in the upper basin, the largest at Detroit Lake and Lookout Point.
Mean annual discharge at Portland runs to about 32,000 cubic feet per second, putting the Willamette among the twenty largest rivers in the contiguous United States by flow. Spring chinook and winter steelhead still climb past Willamette Falls at Oregon City, a 42-foot horseshoe drop second-largest by volume in North America after Niagara. The fish ladder at the falls, completed in 1885, is one of the oldest in the Pacific Northwest.
The river runs highest from February through May, when valley rain and Cascade snowmelt overlap; the cottonwood leaves come in late April. Summer flow drops sharply, and by August the gravel bars near Eugene are wide and walkable. Autumn brings the big-leaf maples on the bank into deep yellow, peaking in the last week of October. The salmon return in two pulses, spring chinook in March and coho in October.