Peter Skene Ogden State Scenic Viewpoint

The oldest of the three is the Crooked River Railroad Bridge, a steel arch completed in 1911 for the Oregon Trunk Railway. It went up during a legendary race between rival railroad empires to push tracks into central Oregon, and securing this narrow crossing was so decisive that it helped force the competing line to the negotiating table. Soaring more than three hundred feet above the water, it was among the highest railroad bridges in the country when it was built, and it still carries freight trains today.

The most beloved of the three is the Crooked River High Bridge of 1926, a steel arch designed by Conde McCullough, the celebrated Oregon bridge engineer whose graceful spans define the state's coast highway. Its deck stands nearly three hundred feet above the canyon floor, and it was one of the highest bridges of its kind in the nation when it opened. Too narrow for modern traffic, it was bypassed in 2000 and preserved for pedestrians, so you can walk out over the gorge on it, which is the signature experience of the site.

Right alongside the old arch runs the current highway crossing, the Rex T. Barber Veterans Memorial Bridge, a concrete arch opened in 2000. It is named for a central Oregon native and World War Two fighter pilot credited in the 1943 mission that downed the aircraft carrying a Japanese admiral, and a memorial to him stands at the wayside. To see the three bridges together is to watch a hundred years of engineering laid out in a single frame.

The narrow slot below you was cut through solid basalt, and the story of that rock is unusual. Long ago, lava erupting from the Newberry Volcano country to the south flowed down the ancestral channel of the Crooked River, filling it with molten rock that cooled into stone. Over time the river went back to work, carving a fresh, narrow gorge down into that hard basalt to create the canyon you see today.

The walls show the classic signature of thick, slowly cooling lava: columnar basalt, the tall polygonal columns that form as the rock contracts and cracks into vertical shafts. It is the same palisade-style stone found across central Oregon, and here it drops in sheer, banded cliffs straight to the water.

Because the gorge is so narrow and so deep, it reads almost like a knife cut across the flat high desert. There is no gentle approach, just the tableland and then, suddenly, the void and the ribbon of river far below. That abruptness is exactly what makes the view so startling from a spot this easy to reach.

The viewpoint honors Peter Skene Ogden, a fur trader and explorer born around 1790 in Quebec. He came up through the North West Company and, after it merged with the Hudson's Bay Company, rose to become one of that company's chief traders. In the mid 1820s he led the Hudson's Bay Company's Snake Country expeditions, long trapping-and-mapping journeys that ranged across what are now Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and beyond.

Ogden traveled through the Crooked River country while leading a trapping party in 1825, and passed through the central Oregon high desert again the following year. The wayside carries his name to mark that history, as does the city of Ogden, Utah, far to the southeast. He was a figure of the fur-trade era, a time when the region was being mapped by outsiders even as it remained, as it had always been, home to Native peoples.

It is worth remembering that these expeditions were commercial ventures as much as journeys of discovery, aimed in part at trapping the country bare to blunt rival American traders. The romance of the name should not crowd out that harder history, or the far older presence of the people who knew this river country long before any trapper arrived.

The Deschutes and Crooked River country is part of the homelands of the peoples now organized as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, a confederation of three groups with deep and continuing ties to this land. The Warm Springs bands are Sahaptin-speaking peoples who live along the tributaries of the Columbia, moving with the seasons and relying on salmon, game, roots, and berries.

The Wasco bands are Chinookan-speaking peoples long established as fishers and traders along the Columbia River, and the Northern Paiute are peoples of the central and southeastern Oregon high desert. Together these three groups have fished, gathered, hunted, and traveled the Deschutes and Crooked River watersheds since time out of mind, and they continue to do so today.

In the 1855 Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon, the Warm Springs and Wasco ceded a vast expanse of land, and the three groups later organized formally as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, whose reservation lies in north-central Oregon. These are living nations, and this river country remains part of who they are, not a chapter closed in the past.

This is a highway wayside, easy and open year-round, with parking, picnic tables, and restrooms right off US-97. The pull-off accommodates larger vehicles, which makes it a natural break for anyone driving the central Oregon corridor. The reward for stopping is out of all proportion to the effort.

The great pleasure here is to walk out onto the historic 1926 arch bridge, now closed to cars, and stand suspended over the gorge with the river far below and the other two bridges in view. It is a genuinely thrilling perch, and a safe one if you stay to the walkway and mind the edges elsewhere.

The setting is classic central Oregon high desert, juniper and sagebrush on the rims, hot and dry in summer and cold in winter, with swallows and raptors working the canyon walls beneath your feet. Golden eagles are known to the area, and there is something unforgettable about watching a large bird soar below you rather than above. Just keep well back from the unfenced edges, because the drop is real and unforgiving.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.