White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach

The Hanford Reach is the one stretch of the Columbia in the United States above the tides that still runs free, fifty-one miles from Priest Rapids Dam down toward Richland, and it is free because of what was built beside it. The bomb works that cleared the river's farm towns in 1943 kept the public off its banks for decades. When the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a Ben Franklin Dam near Pasco in the 1960s, part of the reason it was never built was the prospect of flooding the remains of shut-down reactors.

The river here runs over islands, gravel bars and riffles, and roughly 80 percent of the upper Columbia's fall chinook spawn in it, a share that grew as dams took the other spawning grounds. On the east bank the White Bluffs stand above the water, pale layers of old river and lake sediment, the Ringold Formation, that have given up fossils of animals long gone from the continent.

Campaigns to make the reach a Wild and Scenic River failed in Congress. On June 9, 2000, Bill Clinton proclaimed the Hanford Reach National Monument, taking in the river corridor and the largest remnant of the shrub-steppe that once covered the Columbia Basin.