The Hanford Reach is a free-flowing section of the Columbia River, around 51 miles (82 km) long, in eastern Washington state. It is named after a large northward bend in the river's otherwise southbound course. It is the only section of the Columbia in the U.S. that is not tidal nor part of a reservoir, excluding a short reach between the U.S.-Canada border and the upper end of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, the reservoir of Grand Coulee Dam. Much of the Hanford Reach flows through the Hanford Site, a nuclear production facility established during World War II. It is also the site of the Hanford Reach National Monument, created from the original protection area around the Hanford Site. Upstream of the Hanford Reach is Priest Rapids Dam and downstream is the McNary Dam, which also impounds the last stretch of the Snake River, the largest tributary of the Columbia.
Famous quotes containing the word reach:
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)