Excerpt
The Northwest's longest and largest river cutting a huge sea-level pass through the Cascade Mountains teams with the world's second largest monolith to produce the main attractions for campers at Beacon Rock State Park. Beacon Rock, once known as Castle Rock, towers 848 feet above the mighty Columbia River in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and is second only to the Rock of Gibraltar in size. Several other similar but smaller rock formations in this section of the gorge have prompted geologists to hypothesize that Beacon Rock may be the exposed volcanic plug of an ancient mountain, part of a range that preceded the Cascades. The monolith could be as much as nine million years old.
Apparently unimpressed by this massive icon of geologic time, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to blast Beacon Rock into bits sometime around the turn of the century. Fortunately railroad officials opposed the idea enough to get the demolition stopped. Theirs wasn't a particularly noble reason, however. They just didn't want rocks falling on their new tracks. Another popular idea at the time was to convert the rock to a quarry.
The fate of Beacon Rock remained uncertain until 1915 when Henry Biddle bought it and proceeded to build a trail to its summit. The project cost him $15,000, a considerable sum in those days. When Biddle died, his heirs were instructed to sell Beacon Rock to the State of Washington for a mere dollar. One small restriction accompanied the astonishingly low price, however. The land was to be preserved as a public park.
At first the state refused to honor the terms, so the Biddle family approached the State of Oregon with the same deal. An Oregon-owned park on Washington State soil almost became a reality until Washington reconsidered and handed over the buck.
Today the three-quarter mile trail to the top switches back a dizzying 52 times and crosses 22 wooden bridges. Panoramic views up and down the gorge including Oregon's Mount Hood and Washington's Mount Adams are the reward.