(uplifting music) - For such an important river, you'd think its Euro-American explorers would've been happier finding it.

The Columbia River is more than 1,200 miles long, running from the Rockies to the Pacific, yet the mouth of the river is anything but Pacific.

As a North American river, it is second only to the Mississippi in the volume of water it discharges, it is the largest river flowing into the Pacific from North America, and it drains an area the size of France.

(pensive music) At the point where the Columbia enters the sea is Cape Disappointment.

When you come here, you notice a lot of gloomy names have been attached to the land and seascape.

Just over there is a place called Dead Man's Hollow.

Upstream a bit is a place called Dismal Nitch.

When explorers Lewis and Clark, who traveled from the East to nearly reach their goal of the Pacific, they were lashed by a cold and wet winter storm.

They sought shelter for a week in a gap in the rocky shoreline, which Clark called a dismal little nitch.

Today, it's a roadside historic site.

And the river's mouth and adjacent coast has long been known by seafarers as the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Why all the gloom?

(suspenseful music) (jaunty music) Explorers looked for a great river of the West that could be a shortcut across the continent.

They never found it.

(mellow music) Perhaps that fueled a sense of frustration.

A Spanish explorer, Bruno Heceta, in 1775, thought he saw the mouth of the Columbia, or maybe it was only a bay.

So did a British trader named John Meares, who named a cape for his disappointment in not finding the river.

Captain James Cook, perhaps the greatest explorer of his age, sailed right past it.

To be fair, he was not at a latitude.

He was bound to explore.

Others who should have found it missed it, too.

Like Cook's one-time mid-shipment, Captain George Vancouver.

(uplifting music) It became less of a disappointment to colonizers when American Robert Gray figured out it was a mighty river that might open the interior of the Pacific Northwest to trade an exploration.

He dubbed it the Columbia after his ship.

Even if it wasn't the fabled Northwest Passage, it was clearly important, (uplifting music) but it was tricky to navigate.

If the river's mouth was hard to discern from the sea, the rough waters made entering the river dangerous and often deadly.

The Columbia brings vast quantities of silt and gravel with it, and it's shifting sandbars lay where the rough Pacific and its storms and tides meet the river's enormous outflow.

Getting in and out is notoriously hard.

The Coast Guard runs a lifeboat school near the Columbia's mouth for rescue and heavy seas, the only school like it in the world.

(suspenseful music) You can still see the remains of shipwrecks here or hear stories of maritime disasters on the nearby coast, some going back to the 1600s.

In settlement times, the sinking of the General Warren in 1852 was a much-remembered tragedy.

The schooner-rigged side-wheel steamer left Astoria for San Francisco in bad weather and crossed the Bar with an experienced pilot.

It was ravaged by a January storm and turned back.

(suspenseful music) (thunder rumbling) In a gale and fighting an uptide in the river's current, the General Warren was beached here on Clatsop Spit, the river mouth's Southern shore.

Nine men were sent to get help in the only lifeboat, but before help could arrive, the steamer was battered to pieces on the breakers.

(suspenseful music) The remaining 42 on board were all lost.

An entry in The Organ Encyclopedia says that the wreck of the General Warren, perhaps more than any other, established the Columbia Bar's reputation for destructiveness.

Other victims in the years followed with regularity in the next half century.

The schooner Rambler, the barque Lyonnais, the Macaw, the Cousins, and the Peter Iredale, all wrecked on the Spit.

(compelling music) Since 1792, an estimated 2,000 ships have sunk at the Columbia's mouth or on the nearby coastline with hundreds of lives lost.

(compelling music) The river also wreaks a kind of geologic havoc under the ocean.

(pensive music) During the last Ice Age, when the sea level was hundreds of feet lower, the mouth of the river and the continental shoreline was another 40 or 50 miles further west since submerged.

(pensive music) And the river doesn't end where you think it does; its flow continues underwater.

It's helped carve the Astoria Canyon, an underwater abyss that extends some 75 miles out.

The Columbia continues to shape our region above and below its surface.

(pensive music) The town of Astoria, Oregon sits at the Columbia's mouth and at the continent's edge.

It was the first US settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, founded by John Jacob Astor's Fur Company.

Today, people visit to vacation on the Oregon Coast and see the Goonies House.

(uplifting music) Each winter, Northwest fisher poets put down their nets to read their poetry and drink local brews.

The hoarse barks and deep grunts of sea lions gathered by the hundreds to eat salmon provide a background chorus that forms a riverside soundtrack.

(seals barking) In 2012, a brawl between fishermen and loggers occurred in the streets outside a local tavern.

Here is still a vintage feel of an older rustic Northwest.

The world's not perfect, but at the meeting place between mighty river and wind-whipped sea, it's harder to feel disappointment.

(uplifting music)