Bridge of the Gods

The steel bridge in view borrowed the legend's name. The Wauna Toll Bridge Company opened it in 1926, a cantilever carried about 91 feet above the river on a wooden deck. Twelve years later Bonneville Dam, four miles downstream, raised the river behind it, and the bridge was lifted 44 feet and lengthened to 1,858 feet. In September 1927 Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis up the gorge, passed over the new span, turned and flew underneath it. It still charges a toll, and the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the Columbia on its deck.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bonneville Dam — 2.4 mi
  The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
• Multnomah Falls — 12 mi
  A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.
• Vista House at Crown Point — 19 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.
• Timberline Lodge — 25 mi
  A lodge raised by hand by relief workers in 1936-38, from boulders off the mountain and iron forged from old railroad rails, and dark for an unpaid power bill less than twenty years later.

More markers nearby

• Golden Spike Ceremony — 1.0 mi
• Beacon Rock — 3.4 mi
• Broughton Flume — 13 mi
• Oregon Nisei Veterans WWII Memorial Highway — 19 mi