Colombia River Gorge

After a brief detour to the Mount St Helens visitor centre, (but not the volcano itself which was miles off our route) we took a drive along the Columbia River Gorge. As timings would have it, we pretty much went to the end of our trip - the Hood River, for lunch and then worked our way back for sightseeing. We ate at the Riverside, a hotel restaurant. Food was ok, basically good fish and chips, but the views were fantastic.

 Anyway, onwards to get some photos of snow-covered Mount Hood in the distance, driving through some nice rural farmland.

 Thence back onto the Columbia River. Which is huge.

The Gorge  has tremendous vistas, but we were a bit pushed for time to admire them.

But what we did stop for was a tour of the Bonneville Dam, built in the 1930s. This was a surprisingly fascinating tour. Honest.

The dam itself is impressive and learning about the generation is of course interesting, but so were the ecological effects and how they ameliorated them. So below is the fish ladder, as this is a prime salmon river.

The turbines are of course vast.

But then we went below to see the fish run underneath. The actual fish were visible and hard to spot, but the hagfish were easy!

Amazingly, they also count the fish going through. Manually. Its a specialist job. They work shifts, 50 minutes on with 10 minute breaks every hour.  You can see it might be hard to keep up the concentration.

And before we left the area we had to take in yet another waterfall, the Multnomah Falls - a 188m drop (over 600 feet in old money - the fourth largest in the States.

 As you can see, they built a convenient little bridge across as a viewing platform. Hundreds of tourists here as it is so close to the freeway.