Beacon Rock: The Rock That Refused to Fall

Orientation at the Beacon Rock trailhead on WA-14 in the Columbia River Gorge — meet the 848-foot monolith and get the plan for the drive and the two walks.

The start of the Beacon Rock Summit Trail — Henry Biddle's 1915–1918 engineering marvel: 4,500 feet of switchbacks, bridges, and catwalks up the sheer face. Railed but steep and exposed.

Partway up Beacon Rock — the trail's engineering underfoot: rock, cement, and some seventeen concrete-and-timber bridges bolted straight to the cliff where the natural ledge ran out.

A viewpoint on the climb looking west down the Columbia River Gorge — toward Crown Point and the Vista House, the Oregon peaks, and the islands and wildlife refuge in the river below.

The living rock — spring wildflowers like phlox clinging to the ledges, the rare protected plants that closed the east face, a poison-oak warning, and the eagles, jays, and nesting peregrine falcons.

Near the top, the view east and upriver — the gorge narrowing toward Bonneville Dam and the drowned Cascade Rapids that Lewis and Clark fought down.

The top of Beacon Rock — a 360-degree view over the Columbia River Gorge, Bonneville Dam, and into Oregon, 848 feet above the river.

Stop a second here on the switchback, catch your breath, and put your hand flat on the rock beside you. Go on — feel it. Cool, hard, solid stone. Now let me tell you what you're really touching, because it changes thi…

The Hamilton Mountain Trail on the north side of WA-14 — through old Douglas-fir forest toward Hardy and Rodney Falls. About 1.2 miles in to the falls.

The heart of the walk — old gorge forest along Hardy Creek, its footbridges and plants, and the wildlife: dippers walking underwater, pileated woodpeckers, black-tailed deer, and banana slugs.

The Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Beacon Rock (1935) — Depression-era young men who hand-built the Hamilton Mountain, Hadley, and Little Beacon Rock trails and the park's facilities.

The first waterfall on the hike — Hardy Falls, a tall horsetail of Hardy Creek sliding down the mossy rock, seen from a viewpoint just before Rodney Falls.

The heart of the hike — Rodney Falls tumbling in stages past the footbridge, and the short spur up to the Pool of the Winds, a nearly-enclosed cave that breathes wind and mist.

Beacon Rock's geology: the 848-foot eroded neck of an extinct cinder-cone volcano, ~57,000 years old, part of the Boring Volcanic Field.

Beacon Rock's sheer south face is a legendary Pacific Northwest rock-climbing wall — and a peregrine falcon stronghold, closed to climbers each spring so the falcons can nest.

How Beacon Rock was nearly dynamited into jetty gravel around 1904 — and how geologist Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 to save it.

How the Columbia River Gorge was carved — the Ice Age Missoula Floods that scoured it, and why Beacon Rock survived as a hard volcanic core.

Lewis and Clark's 1805 encounter with Beacon Rock, where they first measured the ocean's tide in the Columbia and knew the Pacific was near.

How the entire town of North Bonneville picked itself up and rebuilt a few miles west in the 1970s rather than disband when the government took its ground for Bonneville Dam's second powerhouse.

Gorge context east of Beacon Rock — Bonneville Dam, the drowned Cascade Rapids, and the Bridge of the Gods that carries the legend and the old landslide.

The Native legend of the Bridge of the Gods and the real Bonneville landslide that once dammed the Columbia — the story behind the name upstream of Beacon Rock.