Hanford Reach
Plan Your Visit
The Hanford Reach National Monument is an outdoor enthusiast's dream. Visitors may currently access over 57,000 acres providing wildlife dependent recreational opportunities.
Hunters can pursue trophy mule deer and the occasional elk from a herd boasting some of the largest elk in the West. Anglers can pursue salmon, steelhead, monster white sturgeon, largemouth bass, walleye, and many other sportfish. Spring often brings good wildflower shows, and abundant wildlife provide year round opportunities for photography and wildlife observation. Old military and service roads provide miles of hiking opportunities, and the more adventurous can head off cross-country on foot.
The Hanford Reach provides motorized and non motorized boating opportunities on the nation's only remaining non tidal, free flowing stretch of the Columbia River. Jetboating or kayaking trips are excellent ways to see the river, experience its history, and catch a glimpse of deer, pelicans, coyotes, bald and golden eagles, egrets, various herons and waterfowl of all descriptions.
The Monument is a land of extremes—heat and cold, water and desert, ancient and modern. While not an unduly dangerous landscape, caution needs to be taken when venturing out into it. There are few visitor facilities at present, and the visitor should plan on self-sufficiency. It's dry; bring plenty of water. River winds can capsize small craft; wear lifejackets. Some areas are remote; let someone know your destination and when you'll be back. Cell coverage is generally pretty good, due the flat landscape, but that shouldn't be your emergency plan. While rare and very shy, there are Pacific rattlesnakes, so don't reach into areas without first checking. The only real wildlife threats would be allergic reactions to insect or spider bites (e.g., black widow spiders).
Visitors should be prepared for minimal signing and primitive facilities. Our brochure is available HERE. If you'd like a paper version, just drop us a note with your name and address.
We also encourage you to visit The REACH Interpretive Center.
Warnings aside, the Monument is a fairly safe and pleasant environment. Obey signs and follow common sense, and you'll enjoy your visit to this unique national monument and wildlife refuge.
Access
The entire Monument is open from sunrise to sunset. The one exception is for hunting, when the hours are 1½ hours before legal hunting hours to 1½ hours after sunset.
Please be aware that the White Bluffs Boat Launch is closed to launching of motorized boats from November 1 through June 30. This stretch of the river is a sanctuary for over-wintering waterfowl. That said, loading and unloading non-motorized craft (e.g., canoes, kayaks, rafts) is allowed, although you may have to carry your boat to and from the parking lot.
Columbia River Corridor Unit — The river's surface waters are open year round. The shorelines (1/4 mile from the mean high water mark) are closed, except at designated locations, as are all islands between Vernita Bridge and the Bonneville Power line (river mile 351). Federally owned islands below this line are open below the ordinary high water mark.
Rattlesnake Unit & Fitzner Eberhardt Arid Lands Ecology Reserve — The Rattlesnake Unit, including the ALE, is closed to general public access. Use is currently limited to approved ecological research.
Ringold Unit — This area is open to the public year round.
Saddle Mountain Unit — The Saddle Mountain Unit is open to public use year round.
Wahluke Unit — The western half of the Wahluke Unit (Saddle Mountain National Wildlife Refuge) is currently closed to general public access. Use is limited to approved ecological research and environmental education activities. The eastern half is open to public use year round.
Trails
There are no maintained trails on the Monument, although a few paths follow existing corridors, such as service roads. A few social trails also exist, the main one starting at the White Bluffs Boat Launch and following the old wagon train route that supplied the Okanogan gold rush. This path heads out to sand dunes perched atop the White Bluffs. The Washington Trails Association describes several hiking opportunities, but be forewarned that these trails are not clearly defined or are primitive. For descriptions of these trails, visit the Washington Trails Association web site and search for "Hanford Reach National Monument."
Facilities
If you're planning on visiting, please be aware that facilities are limited and primitive in nature.
Roads: Access roads in the Wahluke Unit are nearly all graveled. Passenger cars are fine for most roads, with two exceptions; (1) the Saddle Mountain access road may seasonally require high clearance and/or four wheel drive as it ascends up the Mountain; and (2) the WB 10 pond access road is sand/dirt and requires high clearance and/or four wheel drive. When driving, please be watchful for bicyclists, equestrian users and pedestrians, who may be using the roadways.
Restrooms: The Vernita Bridge Rest Stop is located along State Route 24, just south of the Vernita Bridge. Operated by the Washington State Department of Transportation, this site is open 24 hours and provides flush toilets, picnic tables, shade trees, drinking water, garbage cans, and informational signs. Portable toilets are available at the White Bluffs Boat Launch.
When in doubt, call us at (509) 546-8300, or email us at hanfordreach@fws.gov.
Seasons of Wildlife
On the Monument, the seasonal shifts are gradual. One season flows smoothly to the next; one day it's summer, then the next thing you know, the calendar tells you that winter is beginning. You have to pay attention to enjoy the Seasons of Wildlife.
Spring
Spring creeps up on the Monument. There's no sudden thaw, no rush of life. One day you'll see a new shoot poking up. The next day there will be half a dozen. The hills turn green without you even noticing the change. Wildlife is much the same. One day, a returning duck, then two, then ten, then a thousand. Without you even being aware, suddenly you realize life is everywhere around you. The wildflowers come in waves, first the flox, then the balsamroots, then the lupines add to the show. Green is everywhere, highlighted with the yellows and purples and whites of the desert spring fashion show.
Great blue herons and American egrets return to their communal nesting colonies. Cliff swallows rebuild their colonial mud nests. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds send out a horrendous racket from the rushes and trees at rivers edge. Late spring sees does swimming out to islands in the river to have their fawns away from the reach of coyotes, also intent on providing for their young. But while many species are here for the summer, Hanford is also a rest stop for thousands heading on to breeding grounds in Alaska, northern Canada and even other countries of the Arctic Circle. Greater yellow-legs, snow geese and Caspian terns stop by to rest and feed. But the most conspicuous passerby is the Sandhill crane, which is on its ancestral migration from California's Central Valley to south-central Alaska. Everyone loves the cranes.
Summer
Summer paints the Monument in a million shades of brown. The Monument sits in the rainshadow of the Cascades—summers are dry here. Days of a 100 degrees and up-canyon winds dry the moisture of winter and spring. The conditions are ripe for wildfire, and the Monument gets its share, augmented considerably by the ever-present, invasive cheatgrass.
With the heat, the Monument grows quiet—at least during the midday. But life on the Monument doesn't cease, it just adapts. Ground squirrels head underground to estivate until the rains return to green the land. Coyotes and deer and all manner of other animals rest the day away under the shade of rocks and shrubs and trees along water courses, venturing forth in the cool of dusk and returning to seclusion with the dawn. Porcupines venture to the rivers edge to sit with their tails in the cooling water. Activity becomes concentrated around the sources of water—hidden springs, small streams and, of course, the river.
Fall
Mule deer In many ways, fall begins the cycle of life anew on the Monument. Bull elk spar for the right to establish harems of cows for mating, their bugled challenges to one and all reverberating down the canyons. Buck deer do much the same. Many of the shrubs send forth the seeds of the next generation.
But it's the salmon that signify the continuation of life, perversely through their death. The fall chinook salmon for which the Monument is famous come back to the Reach. After battling their way past anglers and dams, they build their redds, spawn and die. But with their last efforts, they create the young salmon of the following year, and even their decaying corpses bring life. Coyotes come to the river in packs to feed on dead and dying salmon. So do the eagles. So do a host of other scavengers. And the nutrients released back to the river from their decay is a critical source for the nutrient-poor waters of desert rivers, albeit much reduced due to dams, fishing and the other facts of modern life.
Winter
Winter can be harsh in the Pacific Northwest, but it's not too trying for wildlife along the Hanford Reach. Yes, temperatures can drop to sub-zero, but prolonged periods of even sub-freezing temperatures are rare. It is for this reason that Native Americans moved here during the winter; the winters were moderate, and much of the game they followed came here, as well. Stores of dried salmon harvested from the rivers just a few a couple of months earlier sustained them through.
Snow in the shrub-steppe is every bit as gorgeous as a Norman Rockwell New England winter scene. Draped from sagebrush , sparkling from Rattlesnake Mountain, blown along with the sands of ridge-top dunes, the snow on the Monument is here, then quickly gone. But while it's here, the rare opportunity to read the stories of the Monument's wildlife in the snow is worth the trip to the shrub-steppe. Follow the tracks of a jackrabbit, and you'll soon find it's daytime hiding spot. But please keep a distance; energy is precious in the winter, even here, and that wasted in flight may make a difference. Less likely to be disturbed, the lucky visitor might find the snow slide of otters along the river. Or track a coyote along its seemingly random ramblings through the land. Or just sit and enjoy the solitude under the wide, pale blue skies.
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About
Protected by Presidential Proclamation in 2000 under the American Antiquities Act, the Monument is a place of sweeping vistas and stark beauty, of towering bluffs and delicate flowers. Wildlife abounds in this harsh landscape—rare is a trip along the river that doesn't produce mule deer, coyotes, bald eagles, great blue herons, or white pelicans. A large elk herd hides in the canyons, and incredibly, porcupines are a common sight. Rare plants defy the desert, wind and heat. Beautiful spring wildflower displays delight the visitor who ventures into the field.
The Monument is also a reminder of our history as a nation. Plutonium reactors stand along the river, remnants of WWII and the Cold War. Plutonium from B Reactor fueled "Fat Man," the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. No longer in production, these reactors are now being dismantled, and the lands and waters cleaned.
So, whether you're interested in history, sightseeing, wildlife, hunting, fishing, or just enjoying a bit of time away from the bustle of everyday life, the Hanford Reach National Monument has something to offer you. But don't come expecting a lot of visitor facilities—they don't exist. You'll be experiencing the Monument on its own terms.
The Hanford Reach National Monument comprises over 196,000 acres in arid eastern Washington and was the first national monument for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Established to protect a unique shrub-steppe ecosystem and over 10,000 years of human history, it includes 46.5 miles of the free-flowing Columbia River. The land's history involves the production of plutonium for national defense during WWII and the Cold War, which preserved large tracts of habitat as security buffer zones. Today, the Monument is managed for the conservation of its diverse biological, geological, and cultural resources.
Our History
The land comprising the Monument has an unusual and colorful provenance. The entry of the United States into World War II and the race to develop an atomic bomb led to a search for a suitable place to locate plutonium production and purification facilities. In 1943, the War Department (later to become the Department of Defense) went in search of a remote, easily defensible, geologically stable site, with plenty of cool water, abundant energy (from hydropower dams on the Columbia River), and a moderate climate, on which to build secret plutonium production reactors. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers selected a site in Washington State near the isolated desert towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. The War Department acquired land through condemnation and purchase of private lands and withdrawal of public lands within the basin formed by Rattlesnake Mountain and the Saddle Mountains. The Atomic Energy Commission, a precursor to the Department of Energy, then established and ran the Hanford Site (then known as the Hanford Engineering Works).
For more than forty years, the primary mission at the Hanford Site was the production of nuclear materials for national defense. The DOE developed infrastructure and facility complexes to accomplish this work in the central portion of the site, but large tracts of land were used as protective buffer zones for safety and security purposes and remained undisturbed. These buffer zones preserved a nationally significant biological and cultural resource setting in the Columbia Basin region, unique in that similar resources elsewhere in the Columbia Basin have been destroyed or replaced by development.
In the early 1970s, there was a reduced need for large safety and security buffer zones around the Hanford Site, and the DOE transferred management of portions of the “North” or “Wahluke Slope” (the area north of the Columbia River) to the FWS—through the creation of the Saddle Mountain National Wildlife Refuge—and to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. By the late 1980s, the primary DOE mission had changed from defense materials production to environmental restoration, waste management, and science and technology research, further decreasing the need for a large land base. In 1997, the DOE transferred the administration of the Fitzner-Eberhardt Arid Lands Ecology Reserve (ALE) to the FWS. In 1999, the Wahluke Slope lands managed by the WDFW, known as the Wahluke Wildlife and Recreation Area, were transferred to the FWS to be managed under DOE permit as part of the NWRS.
In the 1980s, concerns for protection of the Hanford Site’s natural and cultural resource values grew, as did interest in consolidating management under one natural resource agency. In 1988, Congress directed the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Energy to identify and evaluate the outstanding features of the Hanford Reach and its immediate environment— including fish, wildlife, geology, scenery, recreation, historic and cultural values—and recommend alternatives for their preservation. The resulting Department of the Interior report, the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River Comprehensive River Conservation Study and Environmental Impact Statement, identified the FWS as best suited to protect those values and the lands necessary to support them. After years of discussion and controversy, the question of protection was settled when President Clinton created the Monument through his powers under the American Antiquities Act.