Astoria, Oregon: First Permanent US Settlement West of the Rockies, the Column, and the Columbia River

The Astoria Column, on Coxcomb Hill 200 metres above the city, is a 38-metre spiral column built in 1926 and covered in a continuous sgraffito mural depicting the history of the Pacific Northwest — the arrival of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the establishment of Fort Astoria, the arrival of the first transcontinental railroad, and the settlement of the Oregon Territory. The views from the top of the interior staircase are the best available over the Columbia River estuary and the Pacific coast; on clear days, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens are visible to the north. Balsa wood gliders sold at the base are traditionally thrown from the observation platform — a peculiarity that dates from the column's early history as a tourist attraction.

The Columbia River Maritime Museum, directly adjacent to the Astoria tender pier, covers the maritime history of the Columbia River bar — the most dangerous river mouth on the Pacific coast, where the river's sediment load and the Pacific swell combine to create breaking waves that have sunk over 2,000 vessels since records began, earning the designation "Graveyard of the Pacific." The museum's collection includes a United States Coast Guard lightship (Columbia), navigation instruments, Columbia River bar pilot equipment, and a comprehensive account of the salmon cannery industry that dominated the lower Columbia from the 1860s through the mid-20th century. The lightship can be boarded. The museum is one of the stronger small maritime history museums in the western United States.

Fort Clatsop, now Fort Clatsop National Memorial within the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, is 8 kilometres south of the tender pier — the winter camp where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805-06 after reaching the Pacific, making salt, preparing their report for Jefferson, and enduring continuous rain before the return journey east in March 1806. The log fort is a reconstruction based on Clark's original drawings; the visitor center covers the expedition's 8,000-mile journey and the significance of the winter at the coast in their overall mission. The site is in the coastal Douglas fir forest typical of the Oregon coast, which gives the reconstruction environmental context that the drawings alone cannot.

Victorian Astoria occupies the hillside between the waterfront and the column, with a concentration of Queen Anne and Craftsman houses from the 1880s-1910s built during the city's prosperous salmon cannery era. The Captain George Flavel House Museum, built 1884-85 for the Columbia River's most prominent bar pilot, is the best-preserved of the Victorian interiors and is open for tours. The Astoria-Megler Bridge, 6.5 kilometres long and the longest truss bridge in North America, spans the Columbia to Washington State from the city's eastern end; the view of the bridge from the waterfront is one of the most memorable industrial landscape views on the Pacific coast. The nearby town of Seaside (30 kilometres south on the coast highway) is the beach resort town that anchors the north Oregon coast tourism, with a broad sand beach and the historic beach walkway of the Promenade.