Columbia River Explorers

The panel credits Bruno de Hezeta with putting the river mouth on Spanish charts. On August 17, 1775, he read the currents and seething water off this bar as the mouth of some great river or a passage to another sea, and named the bay Bahía de la Asunción. His crew was so weakened by scurvy that they could not handle the anchor, and he sailed on. Spanish policy kept his journals unpublished, and the river took the name of the American ship that crossed the bar in 1792.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Middle Village–Station Camp — 1.2 mi
  A Chinook trading town on the north shore of the Columbia's mouth, where the ground turned up more copper, glass beads and Chinese coins than tools.
• Astoria Column — 5.4 mi
  A railroad's 1926 monument to its own route, wrapped in a 525-foot spiral of Oregon history that ends with the train pulling into Astoria.
• Fort Clatsop — 7.5 mi
  The log post the Corps of Discovery named for its neighbors, and left to the Clatsop headman Coboway five days after stealing one of his people's canoes.
• Cape Disappointment — 8.4 mi
  The headland at the Columbia's mouth, named for a fur trader's mistake and fortified, lit and manned against the bar below it.

More markers nearby

• Middle Village, Station Camp — 1.2 mi
• Fort Columbia — 1.9 mi
• Fort Stevens State Park — 4.5 mi
• Tsunami - Seaside — 17 mi