Astoria, OR
At the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark wintered at Fort Clatsop in 1805-06 after reaching the Pacific. Astoria itself, founded by John Jacob Astor's fur company in 1811, is the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. The airport sits across Youngs Bay from town, on land that during WWII was Naval Air Station Astoria — a major patrol-bomber base hunting Japanese submarines along the Pacific coast. Two runways (14/32 at 5,795ft, 8/26 at 5,000ft), Class D when tower is open. The Coast Guard maintains a major search-and-rescue helicopter station on the field — the bar at the mouth of the Columbia is one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world, and the helos work it constantly. Astoria Column, a 125-foot painted monument completed in 1926, stands on a hilltop overlooking the field.
The southwestern tip of Washington State, at the mouth of the Columbia River — the final westernmost point Lewis and Clark reached on the Corps of Discovery expedition. They arrived in November 1805 and spent nine days here before retreating across the river to the more sheltered Fort Clatsop site for the winter. William Clark carved "William Clark, November 19, 1805" into a tree at the cape; Sergeant Patrick Gass later wrote that the men "in general were much pleased with the prospect." Cape Disappointment Lighthouse, completed in 1856, is the oldest functioning lighthouse on the West Coast. The bar at the mouth of the Columbia, just offshore, is among the most dangerous in the world — over 2,000 large vessels and 700 lives have been lost on it. Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment trains the bar pilots who guide every commercial ship across.
Land at McMinnville and walk across the road to stand under the largest wingspan of any aircraft ever flown. The Hughes H-4 Hercules — the "Spruce Goose," though it's actually Duramold birch plywood, not spruce — was Howard Hughes's wartime answer to the U-boat: a flying boat big enough to carry troops across the Atlantic above the torpedoes. It was finished too late for the war, and it flew exactly once: November 2, 1947, Hughes himself at the controls, half a mile at 25 feet over Long Beach Harbor, about 30 seconds. Then he kept it in a climate-controlled hangar with a full maintenance crew until he died. Its 320-foot wingspan held the record for the widest aircraft ever flown until the Stratolaunch in 2019. After years beside the Queen Mary in Long Beach, it was barged up the coast and the Columbia and Willamette rivers in pieces and rebuilt here, opening to the public in 2001. The museum around it holds 150-plus aircraft and spacecraft, an SR-71 Blackbird, and a Titan II missile.
A 150-mile-long agricultural valley between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range — Oregon's heart, the destination of the Oregon Trail, and one of the world's most acclaimed cool-climate wine regions. The valley sits at the same latitude as Burgundy in France and produces Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris that regularly outscore French equivalents in blind tastings. The first commercial Pinot vines were planted at Eyrie Vineyards in 1965 by David Lett, who took home a top-tier place in the 1979 Gault-Millau Olympiad of Wine in Paris and put Oregon Pinot on the world map. Today the Willamette Valley AVA has 700+ wineries and 27,000 acres of vineyards, most clustered in the Dundee Hills and Eola-Amity Hills west of Salem.
On May 18, 1980, St. Helens blew its north face off in the most destructive eruption in U.S. history, dropping the summit about 1,300 feet and leaving a horseshoe crater open to the north. Inside it a lava dome built through the 1980s and again from 2004 to 2008, wrapped by Crater Glacier, which formed after the eruption and is one of the youngest glaciers in North America. The Cowlitz people call it Lawetlat'la. It has been quiet since 2008.