Following Lewis & Clark Through Wallula Gap

On a windy cold day this October we stopped at Hat Rock State Park in Oregon. I climbed the small hill below the basalt monolith called Hat Rock and took a couple of photos. The hill below the rock was covered with bunch grass and scattered bitterbrush and rabbitbrush mottled the slope. The Lewis and Clark expedition navigated down the Columbia River past Hat Rock on October 19th, 1805, on their trip to the Pacific Ocean. Hat Rock appears like a man made object, a totem or ancient megalith, and it stands in defiance of wind and rain, a survivor of dozens of humongous floods from eons ago, when Glacial Lake Missoula drained, pummeling the banks of the Columbia with 500 foot high waves laden with silt, sand, rock and icebergs. One would think that this small monolith would have been obliterated many decades ago, but the tough basalt armor has proved to be invincible.


Clark writes in his journal on October 19th, 1805.

".....14 miles to a rock in a Larb. resembling a hat just below a rapid at the lower Point of an Island in the Midl. of the river 7 lodges and opposite the head of one on the Stard. Side 5 lodges..."

Not far from that location Clark ascended a high cliff about 200 feet above the water and wrote

"....I descovered a high mountain of emence hight covered with Snow, this must be one of the mountains laid down by Vancouver, as Seen from the mouth of the Columbia River...".

Clark thought he had spotted Mt. Saint Helens but the high peak he saw was in all probability Mt. Adams, in the Cascade Range. Lewis and Clark were familiar with the voyages of Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy, and his explorations of the west coast and the Columbia River, and they must have been thrilled to see terrain that they previously read about. Vancouver had made note of several mountains from the mouth of the Columbia River but he also had sent an expedition up the Columbia River in 1792, lead by Lieutenant William Broughton. This expedition traveled as far as the Columbia River Gorge, sighting and naming Mount Hood.


We continued our drive to the north and entered the Wallula Gap, where the Columbia River knifes through a high basalt ridge that is several hundred feet higher than the water. The Lewis and Clark Expedition camped near Spring Gulch on the river, just south of the gap, on Oct. 18th, 1805 on their way west.

The day was cool and windy and the waters of the Columbia were sparkling blue, rippled by 2 foot high waves, and subdued within its channel of blackish basalt cliffs trimmed with brownish prairie. Just past the Wallula Gap the Walla Walla River taps the Columbia, marking another Lewis and Clark campsite of April 27, 28th and 29th of 1806.

There is a great deal of history in the Wallula gap area, of ancient Indian villages and trails and those of explorers, grown over with bunch grass or flooded by reservoirs. The geologic history is perhaps even more spectacular even though hard to imagine, that icebergs from what is now north Idaho and Montana, streaming through this narrow gap during an enormous flood, some 13,000 years ago. The refuse of a huge glacier breached by the Clarks Fork of the Columbia.

The only thing to dodge these days is the busy auto traffic on State Highway 730 but the views of Hat Rock and Wallula gap make this one of my favorite excursions.