A Boring, Beaten Beacon
- skagitjack
- Jun 7
- 17 min read
Can you name the volcanoes in Washington? Don’t peek at the next sentence.
Did you peek? That’s okay, you know the peaks: Baker, Glacier, Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, and Beacon.
Wait, what? Beacon?
Underneath the northwest corner of Oregon is a weak spot in the Earth’s crust. Over two million years ago, lava erupted in various places around there, creating calderas and volcanoes. It is a volcanic feature geologists call the Boring Volcanic Field, named for the town of Boring, Oregon. These eruptions were unrelated to our current volcanoes.
Beacon Rock, on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, is part of that, an extinct volcanic cinder cone that erupted about 57,000 years ago.
Then, 15,000 years ago, the ice-age floods stripped the softer volcanic material away, leaving behind only the core plug. (Lava flows from Eastern Washington 17 to 6 million years ago created the pancake layers of basalt seen on both sides of the Columbia River Gorge.)
Not long after, the first peoples found a lovely place to live along these shores of the river, with its abundant salmon and other foods, a moderate climate, and easy transportation throughout the area.
The Lewis and Clark expedition ventured down the Columbia just over 220 years ago and opened the door for more than a million white people who now reside along the river.
So there I was, the week after St. Helens blew in 1980, at Fort Canby at the mouth of the Columbia River. I had just been hired to manage the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. As pumice and ash washed down the river and rescues and recoveries took place upstream, I was busy learning about the Corps of Discovery trekking across the North American continent to eventually end up right here, Clark finally being able to say, “O Joy, Ocian in View!” (He was a better leader than he was a speller.)
I read their journals daily, getting to know their story quite well. One little thing that bothered me, though, was that Captain Clark had given the name of “Beaten Rock” to the towering fireplug mountain upstream a hundred miles or more, not Beacon. In his words:
“a remarkable high detached rock Stands in a bottom on the Stard Side near the lower point of this Island … about 800 feet high and 400 paces around, we call the Beaten rock.” [‘Stard’ is short for ‘starboard’, the right side of a boat.]
We now call it “Beacon Rock,” and I kept wondering how it got changed from the one he gave it, even underlining the name for emphasis. It truly looks beaten as you approach it from any direction, though it could be said that it also looks like a beacon, standing high above the flats of the Columbia’s riverbanks.
I wanted to learn more about this rock, to see and explore it for myself. But I never did! What’s wrong with me? Raising a young family is no excuse. I never went.
Fast forward to now. This past Monday, we tootled down I-5 to follow the Columbia upstream to camp at Beacon Rock State Park. Here I was! I wanted to hike to the top of the rock and experience for myself some of the history and essence of this place.
It’s a simple hike, really, climbing from the river to the top on the well-established trails. You gain over 800 feet in about a mile and a half if you start at the river. The trail is wide, much of it paved, with 52 switchbacks, and it climbs steadily with just a railing between you and a very long and deadly fall.
The air was summer warm, the skies clear, our hearts relaxing and starting to feel footloose. After a dinner of fettuccini, we went to bed as the stars came out, occasional trains rumbled by, and frogs serenaded the night.
Just before sunrise, I hiked up from the river’s edge through the forest to Beacon Rock.
Fifty-two switchbacks, that’s not so much, but too many to count while enjoying the ever-evolving scenery, and making sure to keep my feet between the railing and the rock, and making sure my heart is beating at an appropriate speed and rhythm.
Even though the sun had just risen a few minutes earlier, people were already coming back down the mountain. I climbed and climbed, views spreading farther and farther, the switchbacks coming fast and furious the higher the trail rose. How did anyone build this thing, steps and ramps and railings drilled into the rocks, hikers trusting that the bolts and braces are still strong?
On this day, the wind blew downriver like one of the passing freight trains, strong, swift, and powerful. Treetops bent and groaned and whined.
But the beauty, the magnificence of the place, the sacredness of the site, and the spirit of time and history were overwhelming.
Here is this volcanic plug from just 57,000 years ago, witness and almost victim to the glacial floods 15 millennia ago, overseeing the lives of the first inhabitants as they lived in its shadows and fished the river, still here as 33 grizzled white men and a woman with an infant paddled by, which was followed by the explosion of future white people logging and farming and building railroads and cities and dams stopping the flow of the river and then blasting a trail to this rock’s top, then protecting thousands of acres of land all around it, and now hosting thousands of people each year to experience this whirlwind of history on a hike of less than an hour where I had once dreamed of standing, on this beaten rock, a beacon to the changes we now take for granted as normal.
If a place calls you, heed its call. I’m glad I did.
jack
Here is the link to the video I created about hiking to the top, and impressions of its history on the way back down. It's about 5 minutes long.
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For a deeper dive into these stories, here are some references:
For example, how is Henry Biddle related to the Lewis and Clark expedition?
From Washington State Park's description:
On October 31, 1805, Clark described, “a remarkable high detached rock Stands in a bottom on the Stard Side near the lower point of this Island on the Stard. Side about 800 feet high and 400 paces around, we call the Beaten rock.” Significantly, Clark also noted the first evidence of tidewater: “I could not See any rapids below in the extent of my view which was for a long distance down the river, which from the last rapids widened and had everry appearance of being effected by the tide.”
The expedition revisited Beacon Rock returning upriver on April 6, 1806. Lewis wrote, “from the appearance of a rock […] I could judge better of the rise of the water than I could at any point below. I think the flood of this spring has been about 12 feet higher than it was [the previous fall]; the river is here about 1½ miles wide; it’s general width from the beacon rock which may be esteemed the head of tide water, to the marshey islands is from one to 2 miles tho’ in many places it is still wider. it is only in the fall of the year when the river is low that the tides are persceptable as high as the beacon rock. this remarkable rock which stands on the North shore of the river is unconnected with the hills and rises to the hight of seven hundred feet; […] it rises to a very sharp point and is visible for 20 miles below on the river.
Beacon Rock is an eroded basalt volcanic plug that stands at approximately 848 feet. In the 1800s, it became known as Castle Rock. Purchased by Henry Biddle (a descendant of Nicholas Biddle) in 1915, he restored the Beacon Rock name, constructed a trail to the top, and donated it to the state of Washington. The landmark was designated a state park in 1935.
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The following is from the Washington State Park website regarding the geology and history of Beacon Rock State Park
Boring Volcanics
It is part of a volcanic feature geologists call the Boring Volcanic Field (named for the town of Boring, OR), as is the explosive caldera featured in nearby Battle Ground Lake State Park.
The slow-moving subduction of the oceanic crust of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate underneath the North American continent in the Pacific Northwest produces molten magma that rises toward the surface. Sometimes, the magma reaches the surface and produces a volcanic explosion like the eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980.
The Boring Volcanic Field has a more mysterious story. Geologists continue to investigate the more than 80 lava flows, cinder cones and other features of the Boring Volcanic Field to better understand why these unique features formed here. The eruptions that are classified as part of the Boring Volcanic Field began about 2.6 million years ago, south of today’s Portland, OR. They are distinct from the volcanoes and uplift that continue to form the Cascade Range.
For some reason, melted ocean-floor basalt from the surface of the subducting Juan de Fuca Plate (about 30 miles below the surface of the Earth here, plunging to nearly twice as deep beneath the Cascade volcanoes) has been able to find passageways through the overlying rocks in the Portland-Vancouver area. This may be because the Juan de Fuca Plate is getting “stuck” by a very rigid part of the crust in the northern Oregon Coast Range and this has caused fracturing of the crust to the east. It may also be due to a localized tear in the Juan de Fuca Plate underneath the Boring Volcanic Field that allows heat from deeper in the Earth to rise and melt the overlying rocks, producing volcanic eruptions.
Beacon Rock is the core of an extinct volcanic cinder cone that erupted about 57,000 years ago.
Ice Age Floods
During the last Ice Age, a lobe of ice at least a half-mile high blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho, creating an enormous lake called Glacial Lake Missoula. Around 15,000 years ago, the ice dam failed—over and over—sending millions of tons of water rampaging across the land.
Thundering torrents of water, mud, and ice raced through the Columbia River Gorge at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. The force of the floods stripped away tons of soil and rock, including everything but the hard core of the Beacon Rock cinder cone.
Indigenous Lands
Beacon Rock State Park lies within the traditional territories of Sahaptian and Coast Salish Indigenous peoples, whose present-day descendants include members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation, and other Chinook-speaking peoples. For thousands of years this area has provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures.
Traditionally, the Indigenous people of the region left winter residences along the Columbia River and its tributaries in the spring to travel to various areas to collect, hunt, fish and trade on seasonal rounds. The rivers have long served as the primary transportation corridors in the region, and as the source of salmon, a mainstay of Indigenous food and culture. The cascades and rapids on the Columbia River upstream from today’s Beacon Rock State Park (now drowned by the reservoirs behind Bonneville and The Dalles Dams) were an economic and cultural hub of Indigenous life in the region.
Lewis and Clark
The Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, passed by Beacon Rock on November 2, 1805. They had just completed a difficult passage of the Cascades of the Columbia three miles upriver. William Clark noted in his journal “a remarkable high rock on Stard. Side about 800 feet high & 400 yds round, the Beaten Rock.” The explorers’ journals also noted the presence of a large village about one mile downstream from Beacon Rock. Clark noted the landmark again on April 9, 1806, as they returned up the Columbia, its presence reminding them of the arduous passage through the Cascades of the Columbia ahead.
Treaty, Relinquishment and Land Distribution
Some local tribes ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Yakima Treaty of Camp Stevens in 1855, but kept the rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the Cascades of the Columbia River.
Government surveys were completed in 1865, and the land in today’s Beacon Rock State Park passed into private ownership under terms of various federal land disposal laws. Frontage on the Columbia River, including the Indigenous village below Beacon Rock, was claimed by whites in 1865 under terms of the Donation Land Claim Act, which codified land claims for the earliest American migrants into the area.
Beacon Rock itself was purchased from the public domain as a Cash Entry patent by Philip Ritz, the namesake of Ritzville in eastern Washington, in 1870. Ritz later built 10 miles of the Northern Pacific Railway roadbed in the vicinity of his town and developed an association with railroad financier Jay Cooke. Ritz deeded ownership of Beacon Rock to Cooke, but after Cooke’s bankruptcy in the Panic of 1873, the land was sold to a neighboring landowner at a tax auction.
Today’s park campground and upper and lower picnic areas occupy land homesteaded by Thomas Danson in 1905.
The vast majority of the land that makes up today’s park was sold as “Cash Entry” patents in the 1890s to investors seeking to profit from the harvest of timber in the Hardy Creek and Hamilton Creek watersheds. Eventually, most owners failed to meet their tax obligations, and the tax delinquent land reverted to ownership by Skamania County.
Henry J. Biddle Rescues Beacon Rock
In 1904, the land parcel containing Beacon Rock was purchased by prominent Portlanders Charles and Sarah Ladd. In 1912, they sold a 2/3 interest in the property to the Columbia Contract Company to quarry stone from the rock to build the jetties at the mouth of the Columbia River. The company proposed to blast the rock with dynamite, then load the rubble onto barges for shipment to the river mouth. The quarry project was shelved when a railroad company successfully sued to condemn a portion of the property for a riverside rail line, effectively blocking the project.
In 1915, Beacon Rock and the surrounding lands were purchased by Vancouver geologist Henry J. Biddle. He said he bought the parcel “simply and wholly that I might build a trail to its summit.” Biddle also purchased a Cash Entry patent of 160 acres of public domain lands, including the summit of Hamilton Mountain. Biddle, along with Charles Johnson, constructed the trail to the summit of Beacon Rock.
The project, which Biddle financed at a personal cost of $10,000, began in October 1915 and was completed in April 1918. Biddle said that “building a model trail in perhaps the most difficult location in which a trail had ever been built appealed to me most strongly.” The trail was built without surveying the route in advance, due to the inaccessible terrain. The finished trail was 4,500 feet long, 4 feet wide, and had a maximum grade of 15%. There were 52 switchbacks, 22 bridges, and over 100 concrete slabs to span gaps in the cliffs.
Creating a State Park
After Henry Biddle died in 1928, his children, Spencer Biddle and Rebecca Biddle Wood, approached the State Parks Committee about donating the land for a state park. The donation was refused by Governor Roland H. Hartley, who repeatedly vetoed any appropriations for the operation of the state parks during his second term in office from 1929-1932, the beginning years of the Great Depression.
Subsequently, Samuel H. Boardman, the Superintendent of Oregon State Parks, sought to acquire the land as an Oregon state park inside Washington. A discussion with Rebecca’s husband Erskine Wood was made public in regional newspapers, resulting in lobbying for the establishment of a Washington state park.
On April 14, 1935, the State Park Committee accepted the donation of 265 acres from the Biddles, including Beacon Rock, Hamilton Mountain, and the site of today’s park campground and picnic areas.
Additional donations from private successors of the timberland cash entry patent holders in 1935 and a massive donation of 2,227 acres of tax delinquent lands from the Skamania County Commissioners in 1938 dramatically increased the size of the park, still one of the largest state parks in Washington.
A plaque commemorating the work of Henry Biddle was dedicated in a ceremony in September 1937 attended by 300 people.
The Civilian Conservation Corps
In the 1930’s, as the Great Depression deepened, people throughout Washington and across the US struggled with poverty as job losses and business closures erased their economic security. Newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved fast to provide material relief for suffering families, and one of the earliest hallmark programs of the administration was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Intended to provide useful employment and training for single men aged 18 to 25, the CCC ultimately provided jobs for more than 2 million enrollees who performed work in national and state parks and forests at more than 500 camps.
CCC Company 2945 arrived at Beacon Rock State Park in August 1935 but was transferred to US Forest Service projects the following May. CCC Company 5709 arrived in the park with enrollees from Arkansas in October 1936. Three more CCC companies followed in succession, working on projects at the park until 1940.
Camp life was similar to other locations, with a recreation hall and educational opportunities provided, as well as trips into town on weekends for movies and religious services. Much of the work in the park involved restoration of areas burned in a wildfire in 1929. Other projects included road and trail building, including improvements to the Beacon Rock trail built by Henry Biddle. Crews also built a caretaker house, community kitchens, and a campground and picnic areas.
Land acquisitions have continued to expand the park and the stories of its landscapes. The Doetsch farm property was purchased in 1987, including the site of the Indigenous village described in detail in the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and the Woodward family Donation Land Claim.
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A Lewis and Clark website story:
Remarkable Rock
On 31 October 1805, a “cloudy rainey disagreeable morning,” Clark took Joe Field and Pierre Cruzatte, the Corps’ principal waterman, and walked several miles down the north bank of the Columbia “to view with more attention the rapids we had to pass." Below the “Great Shute” he could see “a long distance down the river, which from the last rapids widened and had every appearance of being effected by the tide.” Moreover, he noted “a remarkable high detached rock Stands in a bottom on the Stard [starboard, the navigator’s right] Side & about 800 feet high and 400 paces around.” He called it “the Beaten rock,” underlining it for emphasis.
Tidal Waters
Two days later, camped about five miles downstream from this rock, Clark observed, “the ebb tide rose here about 9 Inches, the flood tide must rise here much higher.” He misspoke, of course; by definition, an ebb tide doesn’t rise, it falls. Meriwether Lewis added on 6 April 1806, that “it is only in the fall of the year when the river is low that the tides are persceptable as high as the beacon rock.” That is still true today, although the tide there, nearly 140 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, is considered too small to be worth measuring. Even at Portland, a hundred miles from the sea, it does not rise or fall enough to be factored into docking procedures.[6] Back east, before leaving Washington City, Lewis had made a tracing of the map by the British explorer George Vancouver, whose lieutenant, William Broughton, had explored the Columbia River in 1792 to within sight of Vancouver Point, about opposite Rooster Rock at Crown Point, where the Corps of Discovery camped on 1 November 1805. It was perhaps that map, as sketchy as it was, plus the knowledge that they had just gone through the last rapid, which produced the expectation they would see tidal fluctuations.
Height
As to its height, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, its summit is 845 feet above sea level, its base 40 to 45 feet above sea level, so Clark’s estimate was closer to the mark than Lewis’s, thinking it to be 700 feet. Lewis noted, on their way back up the river in 1806, that it had “some pine or reather fir timber on it’s nothern side, the southern is a precipice of it’s whole hight.” His estimate that the rock could be seen “for 20 miles below on the river” was long by at least 5 miles. The Columbia flows more or less directly west-by-south for 13-14 miles, but then turns due west before reaching Corbett, Oregon, opposite Reed Island, where it is obscured by trees on the north side of the river.
Naming the Rock
The name “Beacon Rock” was partly celebratory and symbolic. From the time of Homer, who told of the beacon fires that were kindled on seaside hilltops to guide Odysseus home, beacons had been waypoints to landfall, warning mariners away from hazardous rocks and shoals. To Lewis and Clark this place signified the approaching end of the Expedition’s cross-continental odyssey, and upon their return would mark the beginning of the long stretch of rocky river that had seriously challenged their passage to their long-sought port of call. “Beacon Rock” might also fall into the category termed “shift names,” which commemorate places back home, and of which Donald Jackson claimed there were none in the Lewis and Clark journals.
However, Lewis would have known that one of the ongoing issues Congress had to deal with during the early years of the federation was the maintainance of the new country’s coastline, and it may be that he thought of the towering promontory as the kind of place that would be ideal for a lighthouse—if only it weren’t so far from the ocean. At the end of the eighteenth century, technology and construction materials limited the heights of lighthouses. The Cape Henry Light at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and the Cape Fear Light in North Carolina, built in 1782 and 1795, respectively, were just under 100 feet tall. Similarly, the Cape Hatteras light, completed in 1803, stood only 95 feet high. Thus they had to be built on the highest rock, or “stump,” in proximity to the marine hazard, though that was not always high enough to make much difference. Even the third successive, improved and celebrated Eddystone Light of 1759, standing only seventy-two feet high to mark the ship-eating cluster of rocks forty miles off Plymouth, England, rested on a stump that reached only thirty feet above low tide. Those beacons could be seen about 13.5 statute miles (12 nautical miles) at sea, but a light built atop an 800-foot rock could be seen about 38 statute miles (33 nautical miles) away.
“Beaten” Rock
There are no journal entries by Meriwether Lewis for these days that might help explain Clark’s use of the word “Beaten.” The photograph above, however, suggests that Lewis may have seen it first from upriver, pointed it out to Clark, and given it the name. Clark’s word, then, may have represented not a spelling error, but a misunderstanding of what Lewis said, for the following spring Lewis himself wrote of the rock, calling it “the beacon rock.” Seven years later, while editing the captains’ journals for publication, Nicholas Biddle seemed puzzled by the inconsistency, and it may be that Clark corroborated Lewis’s correction, for Biddle inserted the word Beacon in Clark’s manuscript, and used it in his paraphrase.
Patrick Gass, whose journal appeared in 1807, didn’t mention the place, and Clark’s map, published with the first edition of the captains’ journals in 1814, didn’t show it. Those omissions, plus the rush of commercial fur trading, doomed the explorers’ name for the landmark to a short life. Alexander Ross, a member of the Astor fur-trading expedition, who camped near its base on 27 July 1811, evidently was reminded of a familiar landmark back in Scotland, for he dubbed it Inshoach Castle.
In mid-October of 1835 the Presbyterian missionary Samuel Parker passed through the neighborhood, and evidently heard it called Pillar Rock, since he didn’t take credit for originating the name. Incidentally, Parker recognized it as a basaltic formation, and one of the astonishing wonders of volcanic operations, reflecting advances that the science of geology had made by that date.
Castle Rock
Six years after Parker, the Wilkes Expedition to the Northwest led by Charles Wilkes, passed through this area late in June of 1841. In the map of the lower Columbia River that accompanied his published report, the landmark was labeled “Castle Rock.” It may be that he had heard about the rock from oral reports of Alexander Ross’s name for it, or he may have considered it his own, for Wilkes wrote, “The country bordering on the river is low until the Cascades [waterfalls of the Columbia River near the Dalles] are approached, except for several high basaltic bluffs. Some of them are . . . pointed like turreted castles.”
When Olin D. Wheeler passed by it a few years before the centennial anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it was still known as Castle Rock.
The rock and the property surrounding it were privately owned from the 1850s, for a time by Jay Cooke, the Philadelphia financier. The first climbers ascended the rock in 1901, leaving anchors and ropes that encouraged more climbers. In 1915, Henry J. Biddle purchased the rock, and to preserve it from further defacement, built a 4,500-foot-long, four-foot wide trail to the top. He also persuaded the Board of Geographic Names to restore Lewis and Clark’s name. Henry J. Biddle was a descendant of Nicholas Biddle, who was the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals!
In 1916, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names officially restored Lewis and Clark’s name, Beacon Rock. In 1935, the heirs to the Biddle estate deeded to the State of Washington 260 acres of land on which the landmark stands as the centerpiece of a state park.
In the early 1900s, there was every intention to destroy the rock by using it as a quarry for jetty material. The process of digging tunnels to place explosives had begun, but the project was eventually halted in an effort to preserve the rock. As you walk around the base on a secondary trail you can still find the small caves along the south side showing the work that had been done to dig toward the middle of the rock for blasting.
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Another lengthy but superb document to study if you wish further background information about the early white history.
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