Building a bridge across the lower Columbia was an act of engineering stubbornness. The river here is over four miles wide, the currents run at nine miles per hour, and winter storms can send wind gusts to 150 miles per hour. Construction began on November 5, 1962, with concrete piers cast at Tongue Point, four miles upriver. The steel superstructure was assembled in segments ninety miles upstream in Vancouver, Washington, then barged downriver to the site, where hydraulic jacks hoisted each section into place. The cantilevered main span alone measures 1,233 feet. Designed by William Adair Bugge and built by the DeLong Corporation, American Bridge Company, and Pomeroy Gerwick, the finished bridge cost $24 million — paid for entirely by tolls that were lifted on Christmas Eve 1993, more than two years ahead of schedule.

The bridge did not open quietly. On August 27, 1966, Governors Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Dan Evans of Washington cut a ceremonial ribbon while 30,000 people looked on. The celebration stretched across four days of parades, scenic drives, and a marathon boat race from Portland to Astoria. For the communities on both sides of the river, this was no ordinary infrastructure project. It was the end of decades of lobbying, planning, and frustration. Oregon had purchased the aging ferry service in 1946, but even under state management the half-hour crossing remained unreliable, halting whenever weather turned rough. The bridge transformed what had been a bottleneck into a seamless drive, and the governors of two states felt that warranted a party.

In 2016, something unexpected happened. A colony of double-crested cormorants abandoned nearby East Sand Island and relocated to the bridge's steel framework, finding it an ideal nesting site. By 2020, the population had swelled to 5,000 breeding pairs. The birds created serious problems: thick layers of guano covered the steel, hiding cracks that inspectors needed to see, and nests blocked navigational lights that guided ship traffic beneath the span. The Army Corps of Engineers launched efforts to scare the cormorants back to East Sand Island, turning a routine maintenance challenge into an unlikely wildlife management crisis. The bridge, built to withstand the worst the Columbia could throw at it, found itself tested by creatures weighing barely four pounds.

Pedestrians are banned from the bridge every day of the year except one. Usually in October, the Great Columbia Crossing opens the span to runners and walkers, who shuttle to the Washington side and then cover the six-mile route back to Oregon on foot. There are no sidewalks on the bridge — the shoulders are too narrow for anyone standing next to 55-mile-per-hour traffic — so motor vehicles are restricted to a single lane during the two-hour event. In 2018, for the first time, the Oregon Department of Transportation closed the bridge to cars entirely. The crossing offers something drivers never get: the chance to feel the wind off the Pacific, hear the river churning below, and grasp the sheer scale of a structure that took four years and an entire generation's patience to build.

Hollywood discovered the bridge early. Its dramatic rise from a flat, low-slung trestle on the Washington side to the soaring cantilever span near Oregon creates a visual arc that cinematographers love. The bridge appears in The Goonies, Kindergarten Cop, Short Circuit, and Free Willy 2. In Irwin Allen's 1979 television disaster film The Night the Bridge Fell Down, it stood in for the fictional doomed Madison Bridge. For the town of Astoria, which has built a small tourism economy around its film connections, the bridge is both practical infrastructure and a recognizable icon — the gateway shot that tells audiences exactly where they are.