Seventeen years before Lewis and Clark arrived with the Corps of Discovery at the mouth of the Columbia River, the British maritime trader John Meares, sailing south from Nootka Sound, was in search of the river Basque maritime explorer Bruno de Heceta y Dudagoitia believed he had seen from offshore in 1775 while on a mission to discourage Russian fur traders from gaining footholds along the coast. Meares gave up his search after loitering at a feature of the landscape he named Cape Disappointment for his failure to find the river and returned to the north, writing in his log, We can now assert that there is no such river. We know today that Cape Disappointment is the north headland at the mouth of the Columbia River.

In April 1792, while sailing north, George Vancouver, a master seaman and surveyor who had served with James Cook, noted a change in the appearance of the sea water as he sailed past the mouth of the river, but was satisfied that Meares had been correct about there being no river at that latitude, and so did not investigate, observing in his log that, The Sea had now changed from its natural, to river‐coloured water; the probable consequences of some streams falling into the bay, or into the ocean to the north of it, through the low land. A few days later, when Vancouver encountered the American merchant captain Robert Gray in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Gray told Vancouver that he, Gray, had found the river and spent nine days unsuccessfully trying to cross the bar. Vancouver was unimpressed and recorded, If any river should be found, it must be a very intricate one and inaccessible to vessels of our burden. The following month, Gray returned to the river and was finally able to cross the bar on May 11, 1792, noting in his log, (W)e found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered.

How did the European agents of empire fail to locate the largest river discharging from North America into the Pacific Ocean even as they sailed directly into its outflow? That was a question on my mind as I packed up my motorcycle last week for a trip along the Pacific coast that would first bring me to the edge of the continent just north of Cape Disappointment.

The ocean came into view as Highway 101 rounded the south bend of the Willapa River, where Willapa Bay defines the back edge of the Long Beach Peninsula. After skirting the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge in the margins of the ria, tracing a shoreline described by the eustasic action of retreating glaciers, the highway doglegs southeast where it can no longer avoid the Columbia. I stopped at Fort Columbia State Park in McGowan, where I made the photo that appears above: the mouth of the river just out of the frame to the right.

Cape Disappointment is among the foggiest places in North America. The river bar is regarded as one of the most treacherous in the world, where ocean swells often reach a height of 20–30 feet, and is part of a stretch of coastline long characterized as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Since 1877, first the United States Life–Saving Service and later the United States Coast Guard have maintained a search and rescue station at Cape Disappointment, today equipped with boats designed to roll over and right themselves in the surf. More than two hundred years since Robert Gray crossed the bar in his oceangoing vessel Columbia Rediviva, only a handful of people are permitted by law to pilot commercial vessels through the entrance to the river that bears the name of his ship. As I looked across the mouth of the river, it became easy to imagine myself offshore, shrouded in fog, thousands of miles from home with a crew suffering from scurvy, avoiding a hazardous coastline and surf that climbed beyond the gunwale, and persuading myself there was little of interest to be found were I to drive closer ashore.

Back on the bike, I crossed the river on the Astoria–Megler Bridge. Before leaving home, I had consulted the internet for construction and road conditions on the 101 in Oregon and knew to expect several interruptions for construction. I was not yet off the bridge before the first such stop: waiting for permission to continue from a crew that was doing maintenance on the cantilever structure. As I waited, a family towing a travel trailer passed going the opposite direction, one of the tires on their pickup having thrown a tread. There are no shoulders on the bridge, which meant they had to finish crossing the 4.067‐mile wide span before they could stop to repair the tire. I felt really sorry for them, having had some experience with the effects of mechanical difficulties on a road trip schedule.

My notion that traveling after Labor Day would free me from having to cope with a parade of recreational vehicles lumbering down the Oregon Coast was quickly dispelled. I spent much of the early afternoon either stopped for construction delays or stuck in the middle of packs of Winnebagos moving with the speed and grace of three‐legged elephants. The skies were overcast and occasionally splashed me with a bit of rain. By the time I was far enough south to have cleared much of the construction and traffic, I had been in Oregon for hours and was not having a good time in the Beaver State.

As I exited Reedsport headed south, the weather turned foul. I rode through pouring rain for quite a while and eventually found myself on the road in a thunderstorm. More than one flash of lightning lit up the world around me, and rather than do the safe thing and get off the bike, I kept going as I have in the past while dodging lightning. Yes, I am an idiot. I was tired of being delayed.

The schedule called for me to camp for the night in Brookings, but I was well north of there when I acknowledged to myself that I was not going to achieve that objective before it was time to call it a day. Bandon seemed like the obvious alternative, as I had swung east from the coast at Bandon while headed north out of California last year, and so stopping there would close that circle. There is a state park just north of Bandon, and that became my new objective for the day.

I pulled in to Bullards Beach State Park at 5∶15 PM, where I discovered that the camp ground was full. I feel foolish hauling my tent and sleeping bag if I do not use them, but I had tallied over eleven hours in the saddle, most of them dealing with road construction, tourists, and lousy weather, so there was no press on, dammit spirit of adventure left in my butt: I asked the Garmin to lead me to the nearest hotel.

The restaurant Billy Smoothboars caught my eye as I turned down the street to the Best Western on the south side of town. Once the formalities of securing a room were complete, the folks at the front desk agreed that if I was interested in something in the beef and potato category, I need go no further than back to Billy Smoothboars for dinner.

As I made short work of a large rib eye, the folks sitting nearby quizzed me about my bike, home, and destination. As a curmudgeon, I spend quite a bit of my time avoiding having to converse with people, yet when I am away from home look forward to the inevitable good‐natured curiosity about life as a motorcyclist. One couple, having overheard my plan to ride into California the next day, stopped at my table to describe landslides south of Klamath that had damaged the highway and were causing long construction delays. They wondered if I should find an alternative route.

The sun rose the following morning over dense fog that covered the coast to Wedderburn. On several occasions, I had to throttle down well below the speed limit to keep from overdriving the conditions. The fog pulled away from the highway once in a while allowing a glimpse of the surf, but the Pacific was largely hidden from view, making my camera little more than ballast in my tank bag.

There are ten bridges that carry Highway 101 in Oregon listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As I drove over the Rogue River, I had crossed all of them on this trip and finally emerged from the fog. I stopped to stretch and enjoy the blue sky because I knew the forest north of Brookings had been burning for a month, and the highway not far south of me was shrouded in smoke. I was aware that an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine in 1942 had launched a pair of airborne attacks using incendiary bombs dropped from a floatplane into the forest just east of Brookings with the intention of starting a fire, and that while a fire was started, it caused negligible damage. This was much worse. Today Brookings itself was as if looking through gauze, and I am not sure I cleared its smell of smoke from my head before smoke from California wild fires descended over the road.

Having learned the previous evening of the landslide damage to the highway in front of me, I had examined the map and the clock to develop an idea what, if any, my detour might be if necessary. There were several possibilities, none of which appealed to me much at all; I decided to stay on the 101 and take whatever delays CalTrans might toss at me as stoically as I could. In the end, I was stopped only once, and that for only a minute or two.

In the shadowed midmorning light, I was speeding uphill through the redwoods south of Crescent City and finally able to whip through curves instead of idling through them behind Subaru drivers unironically wearing MAGA ball caps. The road had no shoulder, and the trees seemed within reach as I rode out to the fog line, then in to lean the bike over the apex of each left‐hander. Accelerate. Exit. Upshift. Find the line. Downshift. Brake. Turn. Accelerate. Exit. Upshift. I was scooping the air out of a hard right turn when I had to ease out of my line to pass a long‐distance bicyclist who was making slow progress up the steep hill. As I went by, I gave him a friendly beep‐beep of the horn and worried about his safety. There was nowhere to ride that bicycle than the middle of one lane of a two‐lane highway filled with blind corners.

My destination for the day was in the Central Valley, and, much as I wanted to, I did not have time to ride the Pacific Coast Highway en route. I also was not keen on staying on the 101 beyond Leggett because, well, boring. I knew, however, that State Route 299 east to Redding was very probably closed because of wild fires, and so I was prepared for the news when a stop in Arcata to ask a local for an update confirmed that the 299 was opening only once every few hours to allow vehicles to be escorted through the fire zone. Further south, State Route 36 was also subject to closures due to fire, and I could not get good information as to whether I might be able to avoid any such impediment were I to bear east at its junction with State Route 3. Meaning I was committed to the 101 at least until State Route 20 at Lake Mendocino.

Thus it was that I bore inland beyond the reach of the briny air of the Pacific Ocean. By now, the temperature was in the 80s under a cloudless sky. I made the most of the ride beyond Arcata by spending time on the Avenue of the Giants along the Eel River carved into the Yager Terrane, overseen by the southern peaks of the Klamath Range. There midst the Humboldt Redwoods of Humboldt County near Humboldt Bay, guiding my motorcycle beneath the branches of the tallest trees in the world, I thought of Humboldt’s declaration that, Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things,¹ and, recalling the rain, lightning, fog, smoke, and landslides through which I had ridden these last 24 hours, wondered if I might be excused a moment agog at the majesty of this ancient forest.