The Crooked River Gorge is a 500-foot-deep gorge through which the Crooked River flows., The cliffs are made of columnar basalt eroded by the Crooked River since the Newberry volcanic eruption 1.2 million years ago.

The Crooked River High bridge is 464 feet long, and at 295 feet above the river it was the nations single highest arch span when constructed. Oregon’s famous bridge engineer, Conde B. MCCullough, designed the bridge to blend gracefully with the regions rugged landscape — harmonizing with the Oregon Trunk Line Railway bridge of 1910, just downstream. [from on-site kiosks]

This bridge was designed by the famous bridge architect, Ralph Modjeski, who also designed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The bridge was a critical juncture in the Oregon Railway wars which had two competing rail lines building track from the Columbia River to Bend, Oregon. When it was completed in 1911, it was the second-highest railroad bridge in the United States. It is a steel two-hinge arch span with a total length of 460 feet.

Click on the image, in the foreground you will see the railroad bridge, in the background is the High Bridge.[Wikipedia]

An ongoing working sod farm and nursery that is an exemplar of family farming in Central Oregon. In Central Oregon, there are approximately 2500 farms on 1.7 million acres of land producing an agricultural market value of $141 million dollars each year.[Oregon.gov, Oregon State University]

Here you will get some of the best views of the Cascade Mountains in all of Central Oregon including the Three Sisters and Mt Jefferson. The Three Sisters (“Faith”, “Hope”, and “Charity”) are closely spaced volcanic peaks in the U.S. state of Oregon. They are part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a segment of the Cascade Range in western North America extending from southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon to Northern California. Each is over 10,000 feet in elevation, they are the third-, fourth- and fifth-highest peaks in Oregon.

This area was first homesteaded in the 1880s and eventually 700 homesteads were established (i.e., the McCoin homestead). But by the 1930s, a 10-year drought and the Great Depression caused farms to fail and the homesteaders to abandon their land. By 1935, federal land banks and private mortgage banks had taken over 35 percent of the homesteads in foreclosures. The federal government then began to buy the land back from the remaining homesteaders under the authority of the Resettlement Administration and Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.

Management of the land was transferred from the Soil Conservation Service to the Forest Service in 1954. Originally known as the Central Oregon Land Utilization Project, the name was changed to the Crooked River National Grassland in 1960.

It is believed that this area was first travelled in 1845 by Stephen Meek, a wagon master and guide when leading an ill-fated splinter group of wagons looking for a way across the Cascades. The water holes he had seen on previous trips had all dried up.

In 1864 (19 years later) US soldiers came across the remains of 40 burned out wagons, china, and human remains (skulls) of 200 people. It is believed that a “horrific” struggle took place between the Indian peoples of the area and the people of the Meeks Wagon train.

At ~ mile 24, we strongly recommend you make the right to Smith Rock state park. It is only a mile out of the way and the views are amazing and its fun to diverge a bit and watch the climbers moving over the vertical walls of stone like little ants.

This landscape of rock spires, cliffs, and canyonlands lies along the northern edge of the Crooked River caldera, a 26-mile long, 17-mile wide volcanic depression formed through a series of super-volcanic eruptions between 29.7 and 27.5 million years ago. Eruptions from the Crooked River caldera deposited massive volumes (>140 cubic miles) of tuff and rhyolitic lavas, dikes, and domes. All of these volcanic features are now well exposed in the rock walls of Smith Rock State Park.