For our one and only camping trip this year, Fort Stevens State Park had everything, including 3,700 acres of wetland, forest and dunes, and even a shipwreck! The campground is one of the largest in the Western United States with over 9 miles of paved trails connecting all areas of the park.

We crossed the Columbia River from Washington to Astoria, Oregon and set up camp;

then we unloaded our bikes and hit the trails.

Our first stop was at the Shipwreck of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted steel bark built in Maryport, England, in 1890, which ran aground in 1906. We’d come back here later for sunset.

The historic area of the park protects portions of the the Fort Stevens Military Reservation which guarded the mouth of the Columbia River from the Civil War through World War II. We visited Battery Russell where the only attack on a mainland…