The Corps of Discovery arrived at the cove on November 10, 1805, driven off the Columbia by a severe winter storm. They had been racing downstream, low on supplies, hoping to intercept one of the last trading ships of the season -- a rendezvous that could have sent journals and specimens back to President Jefferson and resupplied the expedition for the months ahead. The storm crushed that plan. For six days, wind and waves pinned the corps against the riverbank. Their dried fish was gone. Rain soaked everything they carried, and their elk-skin clothing began to decompose on their bodies. Clark, who had worried about the expedition's survival only once before in the entire journey, wrote that "a feeling person would be distressed by our situation." They were stranded just a few miles from the Pacific, close enough to taste salt in the air but unable to move.

When the weather finally broke, the corps left in desperate haste. They rounded Point Ellice -- which Clark variously labeled "blustering point," "Stormey point," and "Point Distress" in his journals, the accumulating names reflecting just how thoroughly the place had battered them. On the western side they established Station Camp, where they stayed for ten days and held the famous vote on where to spend the winter. Every member of the expedition voted, including Sacagawea and York, Clark's enslaved servant -- a remarkable act of democratic inclusion for 1805. The corps eventually crossed to the Oregon side of the river and built Fort Clatsop, their rain-soaked winter quarters. Dismal Nitch, the low point, was behind them. But Clark's blunt description ensured the cove would be remembered long after the triumph of reaching the ocean faded into textbook summaries.

The cove drifted into quieter uses after the expedition moved on. In the 1870s and 1880s, Joseph G. Megler operated a fish-buying station on the east side of Point Ellice, and the area became known as Megler Cove. The lower Columbia was rich fishing territory, and Megler's operation grew alongside the salmon industry that defined the region for decades. By 1921, the cove had found yet another identity: tourism to the Long Beach Peninsula was booming, and a car ferry began running between Astoria and the Megler dock. The Oregon Highway Department purchased the ferry service in 1946 and ran it until a far grander structure made it obsolete. Construction of the Astoria-Megler Bridge began in 1962 and finished in 1966, spanning the Columbia at over four miles long -- one of the longest continuous truss bridges in North America. The last ferry ran in July 1966. The old landing was demolished, and a highway rest area took its place.

For decades the rest area carried Megler's name, a commercial identity layered over a story that deserved better. In 2005, it was renamed the Dismal Nitch Rest Area, restoring Clark's original complaint to the landscape. A 2009 monument now stands near the cove, accessible by a short trail from Washington State Route 401. The site is officially part of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, linking it to Fort Clatsop, Cape Disappointment, and the other places where the expedition's Pacific chapter unfolded. Historians still debate the exact campsite -- the official marker sits about 500 feet west of the rest area, but some researchers believe the actual location was half a mile in the opposite direction. The uncertainty feels appropriate for a place defined by disorientation and misery. What matters is not the precise coordinates but the story they anchor: a company of explorers, soaked and starving, who had crossed a continent only to be stopped cold by weather, just miles from the end.