Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Wishram, WA

Wishram is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Klickitat County, on the north bank of the Columbia River in the upper Columbia River Gorge.

For roughly 15,000 years, Native peoples gathered at Celilo Falls just downstream of Wishram to catch salmon with dipnets from wooden platforms, and the Wishram village grew into a great trading emporium that Washington Irving described in his 1836 history 'Astoria.'

Lewis and Clark stopped at the Wishram village on October 22, 1805, recording its lodges and the great stacks of pounded, dried salmon being prepared for trade.

The modern town began as a railroad center named Fallbridge, after the Oregon Trunk Rail Bridge that the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway built across the Columbia at Celilo Falls.

Fallbridge served as the passenger terminal, roundhouse, and freight switchyard for the rail line pushed south to Bend, Oregon — a route James J. Hill inaugurated by driving a golden spike at Bend in 1912 — and a 300-ton automatic coaling station was erected there in 1920.

The town's name was officially changed from Fallbridge to Wishram in 1926, honoring the Wishram people, though the railroad section between Vancouver and Pasco still bears the Fallbridge name today.

When The Dalles Dam was completed in 1957, its reservoir, Lake Celilo, inundated Celilo Falls and the ancient fishing village sites along the shore, ending the falls fishery.

Wishram station is still served daily by Amtrak's Empire Builder, and the community remains a BNSF Railway yard and maintenance center for freight traffic arriving from Oregon and California.

The 2020 census counted 366 people in Wishram, up from 213 in 2000; the 2010 census recorded 342 people in 146 households.

The cliffs around Wishram expose layered Columbia River basalt carved by the Ice Age Missoula Floods, when floodwaters rose to about 700 feet above the present river level.