The Bridge of the Gods

You saw that steel bridge upstream, the one they call the Bridge of the Gods. Well, that name is borrowed from a story far older than any steel, and it's one of the great legends of this river — and the strange thing is, it's rooted in something that really happened.

The way the Native peoples of the gorge told it, there was once a great stone bridge that spanned the Columbia — a natural arch of land you could walk across, high over the water. In the tellings, it was watched over by an old woman, a spirit named Loowit, and it stood in the time when the mountains were living beings. Two brother mountains, the tellings go — the peaks we now call Mount Hood and Mount Adams — fell to warring over a beautiful mountain to the west, hurling fire and stone at each other across the river. And in their fury, the great bridge was shaken down into the water, and the old woman with it. The gods set a burning mountain where she fell.

Now here is what stops me cold. The geologists tell us that a few hundred years ago — recently enough that the tribes living here would have witnessed it — a gigantic landslide let go off the mountains right about there and slid clear across the Columbia. It dammed the entire river, the second-biggest river in the country, temporarily backing it up into a lake — and for a time, until the river chewed through it, you truly could have walked across the Columbia on dry land. A bridge of the gods, made of a fallen mountainside. The people who saw it remembered it in story, and the mountains they blamed — Hood and Adams — are exactly the two volcanoes that stand over this stretch of river.

So the legend isn't just a pretty tale. It's a memory — a real cataclysm, carried down through generations in the shape of a story. That's the gorge for you. Even its myths are telling you the truth, if you know how to listen.