There are bridges you cross and forget before
the windshield wipers finish a cycle. The Astoria–Megler Bridge, though, stays
with you like a good road song. It appears just as the Columbia River fans out
toward the Pacific, and that long green structure—etched against a sky that
almost always hosts at least two types of weather—arches as if stretching
before a marathon. It makes sense: for decades, crossing here meant rowing, not
driving. Until 1966, anyone wishing to get from Astoria, Oregon, to Megler, Washington,
depended on a ferry that did its best against the current and the temper of the
wind. Then the bridge arrived and redrew the choreography of the river’s mouth.
At first glance, the Astoria–Megler is a lesson
in applied geometry: 6,545 meters of steel (21,474 feet, a number that sounds
like it came from an accountant with vertigo), with a great cantilever
through-truss span rising high enough to let ships pass with about 60 meters of
clearance at high tide. The main span stretches 376 meters (1 233 feet). Since
its opening, it has been the longest continuous truss bridge in North America,
and it somehow manages to do all that with only two lanes—just 8.5 meters wide,
as if designed with a school ruler and unshakable faith in side mirrors.
The story, though, is the good part.
Construction began in November 1962; the steel was fabricated upstream in
Vancouver, Washington, and floated down on barges, each section slotted into
place like a giant Meccano set. The bridge opened to traffic on July 29, 1966,
and a month later—on August 27—governors Mark Hatfield and Dan Evans cut the
ribbon before tens of thousands of spectators and a shared sense of “finally.”
It completed the coastal route of U.S. Highway 101: one unbroken line along the
Pacific shore where the maps once had parentheses and delays.
For years it charged a toll—just enough to pay
back the $24 million (in 1960s dollars) it had cost to build. The Christmas
gift came in 1993: on December 24, the toll booths were lifted for the last
time, and drivers discovered that crossing the Columbia could be free—and, on
clear days, even poetic. Since then, the bridge has continued its work with the
quiet patience of a veteran: roughly seven thousand vehicles a day in the
mid-2000s, fluctuating with the rhythms of fishing, tourism, and crosswinds.
But make no mistake: the Astoria–Megler does
not hover over a gentle river. Here the Columbia ends and the ocean begins, and
neither is known for subtlety. That’s why the bridge was designed to withstand
gusts of 150 miles per hour and currents of nine miles per hour —the kind of
specifications that sound exaggerated until you see a whole tree floating past
like a toothpick. On stormy days the steel itself seems to brace, as if
clenching its jaw.
And now, the figure you asked for—because Libro
América likes its numbers with poetry: how much water passes beneath it? The
answer changes with the tides and the seasons. On average, about 265 000 cubic
feet per second flowed at Astoria from 1951 to 1980 (roughly 7 500 cubic meters
per second). In more recent decades (1969–2023), the mean has been closer to
235 000 cubic feet per second (6 650 m³/s)—roughly three Olympic swimming pools
every second. And on some days, the estuary breathes backward with the tide;
it’s not that the Columbia regrets being a river, it’s that the Pacific has a
strong personality.
To imagine the scale, consider this: the bridge
stands about fourteen miles from the river’s mouth, where ocean energy already
dictates the rules. Out there, at the Columbia Bar, pilots still call it “the
Graveyard of the Pacific,” a nickname that gives context to the caution with
which this crossing was navigated for a century and a half. The tall main span
and the long viaduct winding along the Oregon side are, in essence, a peace
treaty between engineers and tides.
The flow isn’t clockwork, either—it varies with
spring snowmelt, autumn rain, upstream dam management, and the twice-daily
pulse of the sea. Real-time USGS records from upstream at Vancouver trace
jagged lines: one day the discharge drops to 100 000 cubic feet per second, the
next it doubles. Filter out the tidal noise and you can see the river’s
heartbeat beneath the ocean’s rhythm—a reminder that nature never reads
instruction manuals.
The bridge, of course, has its human side. Once
a year, usually in October, Astoria closes traffic for the Great ColumbiaCrossing, a race-walk that lets thousands of people traverse it on foot. The
rest of the year it’s strictly cars and bicycles—no sidewalks, barely a
shoulder—and in a place where the wind can redesign your hairstyle without
warning, that seems wise.
I like to watch it from Astoria’s riverwalk at
dusk, when the light turns the trusses into improbable greens and the
navigation lamps sprinkle their reflections on the water like disciplined
confetti. The deep rumble of trucks blends with the distant calls of cormorants
that have discovered in the structure a skyscraper with a view. (In recent
years, tens of thousands of them had to be politely evicted from nesting there;
nature insists, and engineers reply—with hoses.)
Crossing it is a small ritual: from the Oregon
side, you rise in a full looping ramp before launching onto the high span.
Halfway across, if the clouds part, you can see the Pacific ahead and the
wooded hills of Washington to the left. The rest is a low viaduct stretching
across tidal flats and shifting sandbars until it lands on State Route 401 like
a footbridge ending on a back road. It’s a curious design—half cathedral, half
causeway.
Some once called it “a bridge to nowhere,” one of those small-town controversies that come with growing up. In truth, the Astoria–Megler stitched together a missing piece of both geography and economy. It linked fishing communities, shortened truck routes, and gave doctors and schoolchildren a predictable crossing where once there was waiting and weather. Above all, it tamed a passage people had spent a century dreaming of taming: the exact point where the great river of the West roars its goodbye to the continent.
Look closely, and the bridge’s biography reads entirely in the future tense: built to withstand 150-mph winds, to endure 9-mph currents, to make Highway 101 unbroken. Yet it also speaks of the past: of the ferries that made their final run the night before opening day, of the tolls that disappeared on Christmas Eve 1993, of the thousands who attended the inauguration like a world’s fair. It’s the kind of infrastructure that sums up a whole region—and paradoxically exists so you can leave it behind. A reminder that travel is also the art of reading bridges, especially those brave enough to span three Olympic pools per second.
