It started as a trickle of water slowly pushing dirt and twigs across fresh mud. Then, drawn inexorably by the rising tide, the trickle becomes a stream and the stream a torrent. Within a few short minutes, some 33.5 acres at Otter Point in the Lewis and Clark National Historic Park were reconnected to the Columbia River estuary and its tidal flows for the first time in more than a century.

You need to replace hydroelectric turbines weighing several tons and costing millions of dollars. How do you get the old ones out and the new ones in safely? Cranes. Lots of cranes.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt returned Saturday to the site of his historic speech at the height of the Great Depression to recite the very speech he gave 75 years ago dedicating the Bonneville Dam on the mighty Columbia River, the most powerful river in North America.