Columbia River | Location, Length, History, & Facts - Britannica

Physiography and hydrology

The Columbia drains some 258,000 square miles (668,000 square km), of which about 85 percent is in the northwestern United States. Major tributaries are the Kootenay, Snake, Pend Oreille, Spokane, Okanogan, Yakima, Cowlitz, and Willamette rivers. High flows occur in late spring and early summer, when snow melts in the mountainous watershed. Low flows occur in autumn and winter, causing water shortages at the river’s hydroelectric plants.

The Columbia flows from its source in Columbia Lake, at an elevation of 2,700 feet (820 metres), in British Columbia near the crest of the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean at Astoria, Oregon. For the first 190 miles (305 km), its course is northwesterly. It then flows to the south for 270 miles (435 km) to the border of Canada and the United States (elevation 1,290 feet [390 metres]), where it enters northeastern Washington. It traverses east-central Washington in a sweeping curve known as the Big Bend, its prehistoric course having been disarranged first by lava flows and later by ice sheets. The ice sheets were instrumental in creating the Channelled Scablands, a series of coulees (steep-walled ravines) trending northeast-southwest in the northern part of the Columbia Plateau; Grand Coulee is the largest of these. The scablands were formed as immense torrents of water, released intermittently from ice-dammed lakes upstream, swept down-valley. Shortly below the confluence with the Snake River, its largest tributary, the Columbia turns west and continues 300 miles (480 km) to the ocean as the boundary between Oregon and Washington; in this last stretch the river has carved the spectacular Columbia River Gorge through the Cascade Range.

Tides flow upriver for 140 miles (225 km). Portland, Oregon (about 110 miles [180 km] from the mouth), and Vancouver, Washington (100 miles [160 km]), are the upper limit of oceangoing navigation, aided by a dredged channel. Through the use of a series of locks, barge traffic is made possible to Lewiston, Idaho, more than 460 miles (740 km) inland from the river’s mouth at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers.