Sandy River Bridge

The board gives the river three names. Broughton's boat crew called it Barings River in October 1792, for the London banker Francis Baring. When Lewis and Clark reached its mouth in November 1805 they found a shallow, braided channel choked with sand and named it the Quicksand River. The sand was Mount Hood's. An eruption around 1781 sent lahars down the Sandy, and for decades the river carried that debris to the Columbia, burying the old valley floor above Troutdale under some 75 feet of sand and gravel. The 1912 bridge here carried the Columbia River Highway.

What the plaque says

Historic Oregon Trail Sandy River Bridge On October 30, 1792 off the point in the Columbia River where the Sandy empties its waters, the boat crew from the H.M.S. Chatham (Vancouver's Voyages) were the first white men to sight the snowclad peak which Lt. Wm. R. Broughton named Mt. Hood in honor of Vice Admiral Samuel Lord Hood of the British Navy. He called the stream Barings River. Later in November 1805 Lewis and Clark called it the Quicksand River. Still later by common use it became known as Sandy River.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vista House at Crown Point — 6.3 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.
• Multnomah Falls — 13 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.
• Vanport — 16 mi
  Briefly Oregon's second-largest city, built in about 110 days for Kaiser's shipyard workers, washed away in an afternoon in 1948, and later renamed out of existence.
• McLoughlin House — 17 mi
  The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.

More markers nearby

• Troutdale — 0.5 mi
• River Highway — 4.9 mi
• Vanport — 16 mi
• Oregon City — 17 mi