SR-14: The Washington Side of the Gorge
From Fort Vancouver up the north bank of the Columbia past Beacon Rock, Stevenson and White Salmon, through the rain shadow to Horsethief Lake and Sam Hill's museum at Maryhill.
The Route at a Glance
SR-14 starts in Vancouver below Fort Vancouver, where the Hudson's Bay Company moved its Columbia headquarters in 1825. For two decades the stockade, its farms and the village outside its walls ran the British fur trade between the Rockies and the Pacific, and the National Park Service has rebuilt it on the original ground. East of Camas the highway leaves the suburbs and runs between the river and the cliffs, past the Cape Horn viewpoints and into the Gorge.
At Beacon Rock, the eroded core of a volcano standing more than 840 feet above the water, William Clark noted on October 31, 1805, that the river below seemed to be affected by the tide, the expedition's first sign of an ocean still well over a hundred miles off. Past Bonneville Dam and the Bridge of the Gods comes Stevenson, then the long open stretch under Dog Mountain to Bingen and White Salmon, across the river from Hood River.
East of Lyle the forest ends in a rain shadow sharp enough to watch from the car: oak, then grass, then bare basalt. This north bank was Chinookan and Klickitat country, and at Columbia Hills Historical State Park, by Horsethief Lake, the petroglyph the Wishram call Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, can be seen on guided walks by reservation. The road ends at Maryhill, at Sam Hill's concrete mansion on the bluff. It was unfinished when Queen Marie of Romania dedicated it as a museum in November 1926, and it did not open until 1940, after both Hill and the dancer Loie Fuller who had talked him into it were dead. It holds Rodin bronzes and plasters and the queen's furniture, and the Stonehenge memorial stands three miles east.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
2 stops along the route, in driving order from Vancouver, Washington to Maryhill, Washington.
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- 2
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let SR-14: The Washington Side of the Gorge do what it does best.
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