The Bridge of the Gods: Geology, Legend, Steel

Around the year fourteen fifty, a mass of rock estimated at several billion cubic yards broke away from the south side of the Columbia River Gorge and slid across the river. The landslide was large enough to dam the Columbia entirely, backing water upstream into a lake that may have persisted for weeks or months before the natural dam gave way in a catastrophic flood. The geological evidence for this event is preserved in the Columbia River sediment record, and it is documented in the archaeological record of the area: Native settlements were abandoned on both banks at roughly the same period.

The Klickitat and Chinook peoples recorded the event in oral tradition as the Bridge of the Gods. In their telling, the Creator had placed a great stone arch across the river as a gift to the peoples of both banks. The bridge fell as punishment for a quarrel between two mountain spirits, Wy'east to the south, whom we now call Mount Hood, and Pahto to the north, whom we now call Mount Adams, both of them in conflict over the love of a third spirit, Loowit, whom we now call Mount St. Helens. The Creator, angered by the quarrel, destroyed the bridge and turned all three into the mountains they remain.

The Klickitat and Chinook Bridge of the Gods story is one of the few Indigenous oral traditions in the Pacific Northwest that has been directly corroborated by independent geological investigation. The landslide happened. The oral tradition predates the written record of this stretch of the Columbia by centuries.

In nineteen twenty-six, engineers built a steel cantilever bridge at Cascade Locks, where the natural dam had stood. They named it the Bridge of the Gods, borrowing the legend for their toll crossing. The Pacific Crest Trail now crosses the Columbia here, on a narrow pedestrian walkway bolted to the side of the steel span. Hikers walking from Mexico to Canada step across a gorge that was once, according to geology and oral tradition both, filled by stone.