OTE - Oregon Travel Experience

Willamette Post was established in December 1813, on a knoll just east of here, by the Montreal-based North West Company, close to the Kalapuyan village of Champeog. The two-room log cabin, also called Fort Kalapuya, was a place for trade and a depot for fur-trapping and hunting expeditions supplying the North West Company’s Fort George near the mouth of the Columbia River. The post was still standing in the late …

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John West was a self-made man. A native of Scotland, he settled on the lower ColumbiaRiver near this spot in the early 1850s after trying his luck in the goldfields of California. West built and operated sawmills, ran a general store and post office, built and managed a salmon cannery, developed and improved canning machinery, and exported lumber. He also exported canned salmon around the globe and left his name …

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Wallowa Lake fills a depression that was formerly occupied by a great river of ice that flowed out of the high Wallowa Mountains to the South. This Glacier Reached its greatest size in the late Pleistocene age about 12 to 40 thousand years ago. As it flowed out onto the valley floor, the glacier built great piles of rock debris around its edges, called moraines. When the ice melted away, …

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Southern Oregon is a land of great geographic diversity. Here are the more than 250-million-year-old Klamath Mountains in the south, and to the north and uplifted 50-million-year-old ocean floor and overlying sediments, called “Siletzia” by geologists. To the east is crystal clear crater lake nestled in ancient volcanic Mount Mazama, and beyond it are Basin and Range fault block mountains separated by lakes such as Summer Lake, Lake Abert, and …

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Weary emigrants traveling westward on the Oregon Trail favored a campsite on the near bank of the Umatilla River at this point. On leaving they climbed the same hill the highway now traverses, then recrossed the Umatilla River at Echo 20 hot, dusty miles westerly.In the years 1863-64 at this site a settlement composed of 3 buildings called Middleton, the first County and Circuit Court Sessions were held in Swift …

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Devastating waves called “tsunamis” can strike the Oregon coast at any time. These waves are caused by great undersea earthquakes that occur along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of the largest active faults in North America. Tsunamis are dangerous and destructive. They have struck the Oregon coast at 200 to 600 year intervals. For example, about AD 1700, a tsunami caused by an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone flooded …

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Devastating waves called “tsunamis” can strike the Oregon coast at any time. These waves are caused by great undersea earthquakes that occur along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of the largest active faults in North America. Tsunamis are dangerous and destructive. They have struck the Oregon coast at 200 to 600 year intervals. For example, about AD 1700, a tsunami caused by an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone flooded …

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This pioneer community gateway to the Columbia Gorge was settled in the 1850’s. Cattle herds of early pioneers were driven to the nearby Sandy River from the Dalles while the emigrants rafted their wagons down the Columbia. First known as Sandy, the present name came from fish ponds built by the town’s founder, Captain John Harlow. By the turn of the century railroad and river commerce made Troutdale a noisy …

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