Columbia River | Location, Length, History, & Facts (2024)

Physiography and hydrology

The Columbia drains some 258,000 square miles (668,000 square km), of which about 85 percent is in the northwestern United States. Major tributaries are the Kootenay, Snake, Pend Oreille, Spokane, Okanogan, Yakima, Cowlitz, and Willamette rivers. High flows occur in late spring and early summer, when snow melts in the mountainous watershed. Low flows occur in autumn and winter, causing water shortages at the river’s hydroelectric plants.

The Columbia flows from its source in Columbia Lake, at an elevation of 2,700 feet (820 metres), in British Columbia near the crest of the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean at Astoria, Oregon. For the first 190 miles (305 km), its course is northwesterly. It then flows to the south for 270 miles (435 km) to the border of Canada and the United States (elevation 1,290 feet [390 metres]), where it enters northeastern Washington. It traverses east-central Washington in a sweeping curve known as the Big Bend, its prehistoric course having been disarranged first by lava flows and later by ice sheets. The ice sheets were instrumental in creating the Channelled Scablands, a series of coulees (steep-walled ravines) trending northeast-southwest in the northern part of the Columbia Plateau; Grand Coulee is the largest of these. The scablands were formed as immense torrents of water, released intermittently from ice-dammed lakes upstream, swept down-valley. Shortly below the confluence with the Snake River, its largest tributary, the Columbia turns west and continues 300 miles (480 km) to the ocean as the boundary between Oregon and Washington; in this last stretch the river has carved the spectacular Columbia River Gorge through the Cascade Range.

Tides flow upriver for 140 miles (225 km). Portland, Oregon (about 110 miles [180 km] from the mouth), and Vancouver, Washington (100 miles [160 km]), are the upper limit of oceangoing navigation, aided by a dredged channel. Through the use of a series of locks, barge traffic is made possible to Lewiston, Idaho, more than 460 miles (740 km) inland from the river’s mouth at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers.

Climate

The Columbia River basin’s climate, strongly affected by orographic influences, is partly continental and partly marine. The Rocky Mountains to the east block out most of the severe winter storms of the interior of the continent, and the Cascade Range to the west shields the basin from moist Pacific Ocean air. Summers are typically hot and dry with only occasional thundershowers; winters are moderately cold and dry with occasional snow or even rain. Temperature and precipitation vary greatly with elevation, but in the central basin January average daily temperatures are between about 25 and 30 °F (−4 and −1 °C), and July averages are mostly between 70 and 75 °F (21 and 24 °C). Average annual precipitation ranges from less than 8 inches (200 mm) at the lowest elevations to about 15 inches (380 mm) near the mountain foothills and 40 inches (1,000 mm) or more in the mountains. West of the Cascades the climate is marine-influenced, with long, rainy winters and cool, dry summers.

Plant and animal life

Native vegetation at lower elevations of the interior basin is mostly of the shrub-steppe variety, dominated by sagebrush and bunchgrasses. With increasing elevation, shrub-steppe gives way to ponderosa pines and then to firs, larches, and other pines. More than half of the original shrub-steppe vegetation has been eliminated by grazing and farming. Cheatgrass has become a troublesome invader. Greasewood and alkali salt grass dominate on poorly drained saline soils, while willows and black cottonwoods dominate along watercourses. West of the Cascades, forests of Douglas firs with hemlocks and western red cedars prevail in upland areas.

Animal life was abundant and varied prior to white settlement. Notable were the great runs of salmon and steelhead trout; populations of beavers, deer, elk, bears, and bighorn sheep; flocks of waterfowl and upland birds, including eagles, ospreys, hawks, and falcons; and numbers of western rattlesnakes. The ability of the region to sustain large populations of wildlife has been drastically reduced, especially for salmon and beavers. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons were once listed as endangered but have recovered in numbers throughout the region. However, there has been continued concern over the declining number of salmon, despite the presence of fish ladders and other passage facilities designed to make possible the continued annual upstream run of spawning salmon beyond dams on the river.